(Let's try this again, but with less fail!)
Getting source tarballs from github is a nightmare. See http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-February/148676.html
The debian tool doesn't help very much because one still needs revision garbage in the specfile. Is there any more recent ways to mitigate this? Perhaps we could "lobby" github to change their ways, at least partially?