Comment 2 for bug 1917877

Thanks Robie for adding such a clear description to the workaround script. Just one comment:

You wrote that adding a ".empty" placeholder file wouldn't work, but I think that a file named ".git-ubuntu-empty~" would work, as it's ignored by the dpkg-source diff check for unexpected changes *and* it's deleted by dh_clean before all the other builds targets, so the build process finds all the empty dirs it expects.

This said, I agree that modifying the source tree from the archive is not nice. What I like of your workaround is that it works at the git (index) level, not at the git-ubuntu/importer level.