Re: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian

On Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:38, Nilesh Patra <[email protected]> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>On 22/07/26 9:05 pm, Matthias Geiger wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> What follows is a GR proposal to ban LLM contributions.
>> 
>> It is time for Debian to make a statement regarding generative AI and LLM usage.
>> Since this has been discussed in exhaustive detail on -private and -project,
>> the proposal follows below without any further discussion.
>> 
>> 
>> BEGIN PROPOSAL
>> 
>> 
>> Preamble
>> ===========
>> 
>> This proposal aims to expressly forbid any contributions to Debian written with
>> the use or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools.
>> 
>> The scope of this GR is (non-exhaustive): 
>> - Debian source packages
>> - Official Debian project software, such as lintian
>Lintian maintainer here. I was thinking if for non-packaging work/code tools like
>lintian or debci, we could instead have a different policy or maybe a per repository
>policy?
>
Right, this might be a sensible middle ground, though I still stand by 
my proposal and won't withdraw it.
>The contributions here are subtly different from debian packaging contributions, as this
>receives mostly coding/programming contributions instead of packaging bug fixes.
>It'd certainly lower the barrier if people could paste strange perl syntax into an
>LLM and ask it to explain the same to them. 
>
>ould it be possible to have policies exempt of these tools, and have either a
>per-repo policy or a general policy for non-packaging contributions?
>Would that make sense?
>
Ians' proposal would exactly allow that: Per-team/per-repo decisions 
whether LLMs would be allowed in developing it. If e.g. the lintian team 
chose to disallow LLMs for all its contributions, that could be stated 
in the README etc.

best,