Comment 4 for bug 768640

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I guess the current default makes sense in that we encourage folks to submit changes to Debian first. Maybe all we really need is an update to merge-upstream's --help docs. Here's some suggested text for the middle two paragraphs:

"If the package has a debian/watch file, merge-upstream will look for a new upstream source at the specified url, using uscan(1). If the new upstream version number cannot be automatically determined, or if you want to specify a different upstream version, use the --version option.

The distroseries shown in the top changelog entry will be used as the default distroseries for the new changelog entry. You can override this with the --distribution option. The distroseries is used to guess the version number suffix for the new changelog entry."

Does that help?