On Sat, Jul 25, 2026 at 02:11:29AM +0900, Simon Richter wrote:
On 7/23/26 20:12, Marc Haber 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, because otherwise you are offloading this work to the DFSG team.
They're going to do that work anyway. And I think you ignored what I
wrote in the parenthesis. I am sure that the LLM copyright review will
be better than mine (which I inevitably do with my fists clenched).
The problem with AI workflows is that they move the effort from the
"writing" to the "reviewing" stage. Doing a proper review is more than
"sampling" the output, so the "efficiency" gain of such an approach
happens on the backs of other volunteers.
Package maintainers are volunteers as well. I didnt say I wouldnt do any
review. I just have the experience that the LLMs output is regularly
better than my first approach. And it takes a tenth of the time, so I
have WAY more time for review.
And we all know that reviewing your own work is grossly ineffective.
The role of the submitter then changes from a person *doing* work to a
person *directing* the work of the volunteers -- basically, I can
raise the priority of my wishlist bugs by simply feeding it to a
prompt, and dumping the result into a PR. The actual work is then done
by the maintainers in the time they reserved for onboarding new
project members.
I am one of those maintainers, and this GR is trying to take away a just
gained tool that frees my time to help others or to produce other
software.
It could kill Debian.
People getting frustrated with reviewing slop has a much higher chance
of killing Debian.
I disagree.
Obligatory remark: my main issue with AI is resource usage, that alone
makes it completely unacceptable for me to use for anything. Any
concerns about the negative social or technical effects are secondary,
but I recognize that there are people who believe that the resource
expenditure can somehow be rationalized, and who need other arguments.
I do understand your idea, but if you don't do that work, other people
are going to do it outside Debian, with the result of Debian losing
significance while new things happen elsewhere.
Greetings
Marc
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Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
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