Sending patches to Debian: Salsa vs. the BTS

[Robie Basak]

I've seen ponderences in the past about whether developers should send
patches to Salsa or to the BTS. Since so many packages are hosted on
Salsa, we often appear to have a choice of either. Salsa is nice because
of its git integration and integrated code review capabilities, but
there was a concern that Debian maintainers were missing Salsa merge
requests or were otherwise not interested in processing them.

Summary: if a particular package's Vcs-Git points to Salsa, and Salsa
accepts merge requests for that package, then we can expect that the
maintainer will accept a Salsa merge request. Sending a patch to the
Debian BTS should also always be fine.

I thought it might be useful to bring to attention Debian's
recommendations to Debian maintainers on this, which Sam Hartman drove
sorting out when he was DPL.

Debian's key recommendations are:

* If you host your package on a platform like salsa.debian.org that
  supports merge requests, it is recommended that you accept merge
  requests and process them.  On salsa, setting your notification
  setting to 'watch' for a given repository with give you email
  notifications for incoming merge requests.  It is not reasonable to
  leave merge requests enabled and ignore them; if you do not plan to
  process merge requests, disable the feature.

* Maintainers are expected to process patches in the bts.  You can
  provide merge requests as an option, but you need to still process
  patches received via the bts.

If you have any difficulties, then it might be helpful to point Debian
maintainers to the full recommendations.

You can read more here:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2020/04/msg00009.html

HTH,

Robie
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