The recent Alioth migration (thanks, Alioth folks!) led to slight variations in the URL schemes for various VCS. I guess some migration path will be considered but in the meanwhile that seemed to be a good example for the nice git-config insteadOf trick.

Here’s the bottom of ~/.gitconfig:

[url "git://anonscm.debian.org"]
    insteadOf = "git://git.debian.org"
[url "ssh://git.debian.org"]
    pushInsteadOf = "git://git.debian.org"

And tada! debcheckout picks the appropriate service (anonscm for anonymous access), and one is still able to push (through ssh) without having to change the URL in each and every .git/config file (which would also lead to higher CPU usage when updating afterwards).