On Fri, 25 May 2018, Ian Jackson wrote:
> 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.
Its not a matter of free software, but a matter of us having to support those
patches - which is something we don't want to do.
Alex
