The reason I'm tracking is because I actually use the generated packages. But I'm totally unfamiliar with the salsa continuous integration stuff. Wouldn't mind learning though.
Happy to change workflow, maybe do development on a different branch? Or, could make snapshot upstream releases 1.0.20+git.DATE.N.ID, or 1.1.0~git.DATE.N.ID, which are based on particular upstream commit IDs and pushed into pristine-tar.