I have a few questions relating to pike in Debian (as you may know, the previous maintainer has retired from Debian and orphaned his packages).
I've figured out that one can get a fresh tarball from http://pike.ida.liu.se/generated/pikefarm/packages/7.6/latest. What's the difference between that and checking out from CVS and running "make source" (which is what I suspect Marek has done), if any? Is there any archive of such tarballs except for the official releases?
How did the packaging/debian subdirectory originally come to be? Do you synchronize with the Debian package yourself or has Marek been sending you patches? I see that export.pike adds new records to packaging/debian/changelog. AFAICT, export.pike --tag first increments the build number (to an even number, typically), then tags, then increment the build number again, so that an even build number represents a known state of the source, whereas an odd build number can include any number of commits inbetween.