On 2026-07-24 16:54, Matthias Geiger wrote:
>> I still have to manually grep trough the sources of a package I
>> maintain to manually create debian/copyright files instead of
>> uploading the source package to an LLM asking for a debian/copyright
>> file (and of course sampling whether the output makes sense)?
>>
> Yes, how every package so far has been created. If we can't trust
> contributors to write a proper d/copyright file by themselves we might
> aswell give up on the NEW queue. Part of Debians' trust is that we
> precisely document every source file shipped by the package.
The machine-readable format is also trivially machine-writable, but I
don't think that was the point being made.
If the point being made was about analysis, then we already blindly
trust tools: grep, licensecheck, cme, and so on. The only file I, as a
maintainer, ever look at intentionally is COPYRIGHT or LICENSE.
And where grep would (and other tools might, too) stumble over a
copyrgiht Foo Bar
an LLM very most likely would not, given how the operate.
Best,
Christian
