Salsa - best thing in Debian in recent years? (Re: finally end single-person maintainership)

[Otto Kekäläinen <otto@debian.org>]

Hi Bill and Wookey!

In a recent long thread on debian-devel you had somewhat negative
sentiments towards the usefulness of Salsa. I do see you doing good
technical work for Debian and recently a MR from Bill too, so I was
thinking that maybe you will change your mind when you read more
in-depth arguments. This is my attempt to have you think about Salsa
in a new light:

On Tue, 9 Apr 2024 at 11:41, Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> wrote:
> Having a repository on salsa or even "packaging team" does not prevent
> a lack of maintainer, so this is not relevant.
> Without a maintainer, no contribution will be merged in any case.

Consider this Merge Request to fix debbugs builds immediately, and to
include Salsa-CI to keep the build from regressing again:
https://salsa.debian.org/debbugs-team/debbugs/-/merge_requests/19

1. If the package was not on git and Salsa, I would have no way to see
what the maintainers have been doing in the years 2018-2023 (Debian
repos had last upload in 2018)

2. If the package was not on Salsa, and had the MR feature active, I
would not be able to submit a MR to fix the issues. Now the MR is up
there, and anybody can review and comment it - thus we are not even
dependent on the original maintainers alone.

3. The UI is easy and useful. I invite you to read my MR and add your
review. I made have some extra instructions to make this very
welcoming for people who do not "like" Salsa/GitLab and might feel
that something is unintuitive

4. If you don't want to use the web UI, you can also download my patch
https://salsa.debian.org/debbugs-team/debbugs/-/merge_requests/19.patch
and review by email. Or you can click in the UI once to subscribe the
MR and then continue review/comments by email.


Personally I fully agree with the people stating that "Salsa is the
best thing in Debian in the past 20 years". So far everyone I talked
to who initially had reservations regarding using Salsa have started
liking it after they learned a bit more how it works, and have seen
things like Salsa-CI in action saving the Debian archive from needless
widespread failures.

Thanks,

Otto