Ease your vendor branch management worries with Piston, a tool to copy vendor / upstream code to your own repository, while preserving your local patches.
Many people worked on making Piston a better tool. In no particular order:
Paul contributed a couple of fixes to Git support early during my rewrite. I don't have a link for Paul, so if you recognize your commit, send me an email!
Josh contributed the --repository-type option to the import subcommand and reorganized the tests. He also made the update subcommand safe in the face of errors.
Marcos contributed lock and unlock. Marcos also worked hard to refactor the test suite.
Scambra single-handedly made the update command do all the nice things: adds, deletes, changes, as well as handling local changes. When I began writing Cucumber tests, they were all green thanks to Scambra's hard work.
Scambra also contributed import subcommand improvements. When you run import without specifying the 2nd (optional argument), Scambra's code is choosing a reasonable default behind the scenes.
Geoffrey contributed the first gemspec.
Psyche contributed some subcommand refactorings. I don't have a link for Psyche, so if you recognize your commit, send me email!