Hi,
As a member of the DFSG team, I want to step in and take ownership of
the current situation regarding the automated LLM summaries in the NEW
queue.
First, I want to emphasize that this tool was introduced as a
good-faith initiative from within our team, aimed at increasing
transparency and sharing the heuristics we see during reviews. However,
we regret that it was deployed without the broader coordination,
discussion, or community input that a change of this visibility clearly
warranted. I want to acknowledge the confusion and hurt this lack of
prior communication has caused within the project.
Thanks for acknowledging that. I think the main reason people (myself)
are angry, is that (mostly) three points:
1) Not making the mails explicitly opt-out in the first place.
This is just hostile IMO. Most already get >20 mails/day, and this just
adds to that. Just externalizing a mostly-correct generated text dump on
maintainers feels highly disrespectful. Even if someone wanted to
receive the mails, they should have to explicitly enable them.
2) Neither announcing this, nor having prior discussion.
This is probably what angers me the most. We have all those guidelines
(GR, policy, Code of Conduct, DFSG) that we expect all contributors to
follow.
For such a large-scale change to just be enabled silently over night
equates an absolute absence of transparency.
While the social contract does only mention bugs (ยง3, we will not hide
problems), this has the same ring to it.
I always assumed "just doing" things, especially with such a broad
impact on the project, was not the Debian way and how we do things. This
leaves a rather poor impression of secrecy in the DFSG team for me.
Every other (technical) change in Debian, like the recent removal of
WebKitGTK for BE was announced, then discussed. Whether one likes this
or not, it is the established process. Except this wasn't done here.
3) Directly contradicting with the GR outcome
As Ian and Maytham already pointed out, this a direct violation of the
GR. It is a large-scale change, that was neither discussed, nor was
consensus sought, nor announced. It just was there one day.
I would expect at the very least that the DFSG team puts this on hold,
disables the mails from the LLM, and has a discussion on -project.
Otherwise, what good is the GR if it is factually ignored ?
best,
--
Matthias Geiger <werdahias>
Debian Developer -- KiCad Contributor
GPG: ECBEDBB607B9B2BE
