Want to make salsa advertise contact and source code details

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Sean Whitton writes ("Re: Bug#864354: Bug #864354 in <somepkg> marked as pending"):
> Thank you for advocating on behalf of users who are not in a position to
> use the web form, Ian.

Thanks for your support, Sean.  I have submitted:

 https://salsa.debian.org/salsa/webhook/merge_requests/7
   Improve emails slightly

 https://salsa.debian.org/salsa/support/issues/77
   Please provide web page footer on every page with service information

In response to the latter, Alexander Wirt writes:

  Unless this is possible without patching, this will not happen.

I have no idea whether it is possible without patching.  It seems like
the kind of feature that would probably already be present and, if
not, the kind of feature that upstream would probably be happy to
take.  Failing that, there must surely be some nearly equivalent thing
that can be done.

Perhaps someone who knows the gitlab codebase, and/or Ruby, better,
would like to take a look ?


But, I find this response worrying.  It makes me wonder whether Salsa
is in fact really Free Software, for Debian.  I don't want to suck
energy out of the Salsa team, but:

Free Software is not only a question of licences and legal
permissions.  Software is free for a particular user or group of users
if those users can, in practice, exercise the four freedoms, including
modifying it and using the modified version.  (And yes, that means
software freedom can be a matter of degree rather than an absolute,
because it matters how easy it is to exercise one's freedoms.)

IMO if we cannot, in practice, modify gitlab as used in Salsa, even to
make simple changes, then it is not free software for us.

Thanks,
Ian.