Are you a student aspiring to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2025? Would you like to improve the continuous integration pipeline used at salsa.debian.org, the Debian GitLab instance, to help improve the quality of tens of thousands of software packages in Debian?
This summer 2025, I and Emmanuel Arias will be participating as mentors in the GSoC program. We are available to mentor students who propose and develop improvements to the Salsa CI pipeline, as we are members of the Debian team that maintains it.
A post by Santiago Ruano Rincón in the GitLab blog explains what Salsa CI is and its short history since inception in 2018. At the time of the article in fall 2023 there were 9000+ source packages in Debian using Salsa CI. Now in 2025 there are over 27,000 source packages in Debian using it, and since summer 2024 some Ubuntu developers have started using it for enhanced quality assurance of packaging changes before uploading new package revisions to Ubuntu. Personally, I have been using Salsa CI since its inception, and contributing as a team member since 2019. See my blog post about GitLab CI for MariaDB in Debian for a description of an advanced and extensive use case.
Helping Salsa CI is a great way to make a global impact, as it will help avoid regressions and improve the quality of Debian packages. The benefits reach far beyond just Debian, as it will also help hundreds of Debian derivatives, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Tails, Purism PureOS, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, Raspberry Pi OS, a large portion of Docker containers, and even the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Improving Salsa CI: more features, robustness, speed
While Salsa CI with contributions from 71 people is already quite mature and capable, there are many ideas floating around about how it could be further extended. For example, Salsa CI issue #147 describes various static analyzers and linters that may be generally useful. Issue #411 proposes using libfaketime to run autopkgtest on arbitrary future dates to test for failures caused by date assumptions, such as the Y2038 issue.
There are also ideas about making Salsa CI more robust and code easier to reuse by refactoring some of the yaml scripts into independent scripts in #230, which could make it easier to run Salsa CI locally as suggested in #169. There are also ideas about improving the Salsa CI’s own CI to avoid regressions from pipeline changes in #318.
The CI system is also better when it’s faster, and some speed improvement ideas have been noted in #412.
Improvements don’t have to be limited to changes in the pipeline itself. A useful project would also be to update more Debian packages to use Salsa CI, and ensure they adopt it in an optimal way as noted in #416. It would also be nice to have a dashboard with statistics about all public Salsa CI pipeline runs as suggested in #413.
These and more ideas can be found in the issue list by filtering for tags Newcomer, Nice-To-Have or Accepting MRs. A Google Summer of Code proposal does not have to be limited to these existing ideas. Participants are also welcome to propose completely novel ideas!
Good time to also learn Debian packaging
Anyone working with Debian team should also take the opportunity to learn Debian packaging, and contribute to the packaging or maintenance of 1-2 packages in parallel to improving the Salsa CI. All Salsa CI team members are also Debian Developers who can mentor and sponsor uploads to Debian.
Maintaining a few packages is a great way to eat your own cooking and experience Salsa CI from the user perspective, and likely to make you better at Salsa CI development.
Apply now!
The contributor applications opened yesterday on March 24, so to participate act now! If you are an eligible student and want to attend, head over to summerofcode.withgoogle.com to learn more.
There are over a thousand participating organizations, with Debian, GitLab and MariaDB being some examples. Within these organizations there may be multiple subteams and projects to choose from. The full list of participating Debian projects can be found in the Debian wiki.
If you are interested in GSoC for Salsa CI specifically, feel free to
- Reach out to me and Emmanuel by email at otto@ and eamanu@ (debian.org).
- Sign up at salsa.debian.org for an account (note it takes a few days due to manual vetting and approval process)
- Read the project README, STRUCTURE and CONTRIBUTING to get a developer’s overview
- Participate in issue discussions at https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/issues/
Note that you don’t have to wait for GSoC to officially start to contribute. In fact, it may be useful to start immediately by submitting a Merge Request to do some small contribution, just to learn the process and to get more familiar with how everything works, and the team maintaining Salsa CI. Looking forward to seeing new contributors!