Re: LLM Commit in upstream `master`?!

> From: Sean Whitton <[email protected]>
> Cc: Christine Lemmer-Webber <[email protected]>, Divya Ranjan Pattanaik
>  <[email protected]>, [email protected]
> Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:21:35 +0100
> 
> Yuan Fu [25/Jul 12:13pm -07] wrote:
> > And reading the thread more, I’m a bit confused: does the hand-written
> > policy apply to commit messages? My understanding is that all code and
> > prose must by hand-written. Sorry if I’m not catched up on the policy.
> 
> Yes, it applies to those.  Remember that we export them as ChangeLog files.
> 
> So just to confirm, only the commit message was LLM-authored, nothing else?
> 
> Eli, what do you think we should do?  Should we ask the Savannah admins
> to help us forcefully undo this commit, or is it enough just to replace
> the entry in the ChangeLog file exported after cutting the emacs-32
> release branch?

I don't see any problem with having the commit log message generated
by a program.  Those messages are not covered by copyright, and are
quite short, so I see no problem in using LLM for that.  Why do you
see a problem, and what is that based on?  The GNU policy is only
talking about code, AFAIU.

We should remove the Co-Authered-By heading, but that can be done by
editing the generated ChangeLog.

> I think the commit message saying co-authored by Claude even though the
> code in the commit was not co-authored by the LLM is a problem because
> we have no way of telling people that, in fact, this commit is not
> LLM-authored.  So I worry that people will keep finding it and then
> coming to the list to ask about it.  So I think that we should consider
> asking the Savannah admins for help.

We could do that, but forced commits are trouble for everyone, so we
should think hard whether this is justified.  We have more grave
mistakes in commit messages, like the missing
Copyright-paperwork-exempt thingies (which _are_ legally significant),
but we never even bother fixing them.  If the only problem is to cope
with people who ask questions about that, I'd say "bring them on".