On 04/03/26 at 10:37 -0700, Bdale Garbee wrote: > I'd love to see this conversation focus less on concerns about who is > or is not using whatever tooling to help them write code, and more on > the longer term support implications. Things that worry me, like what > is the preferred form of modification for code written by issuing chat > prompts?
Assuming we are making the hypothesis of an LLM that is packaged in Debian and used as part of the build process of the package (so it's a build-dependency, and does not require internet access during build), how is that different from the 'bc' source package's use of flex/bison to generate C source files[0], or the 'swiglpk' source package's use of swig? In both cases, the preferred form for modification would be the input to the tool, not the generated source code. > And what does a reproducible build look like if we someday > decide prompts are source code and there's a significant > non-deterministic element operating between the human expression of > intent or need and a compiled object code? I agree that's a difficult problem. I wonder if we already have packages that are unreproducible in some cases due to floating-point arithmetic? Lucas [0] actually the 'bc' source package does not call flex/bison to regenerate generated source files like bc/bc.c, but it probably should.
