I maintain the game lugaru [1] within the team.
Upstream provides a file, .gitlab-ci.yml, which enables CI tests on
Salsa even though the file has nothing to do with the Debian package.
Because of that, every time I push changes to the repository, tests are
run, fail, and I receive failure notifications.
I just set your custom CI path to:
debian/gitlab-ci.yml
That gives you the option of providing your own yml in the future but it should cause Salsa to ignore the upstream one. Does that fix your problem?
-Olek