Re: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian

On 28/07/26 at 19:49 +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote:
> On 28/07/26 3:01 pm, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Andrea Pappacoda writes ("Re: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian"):
> >> On Mon Jul 27, 2026 at 6:07 PM -03, Matthias Geiger wrote:
> >>> 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.
> >>
> >> Does it? It allows "Moderators and disciplinary teams" to do so, such as 
> >> list masters. I don't read it as granting per-repo exeptions.
> > 
> > Matthias's scenario is indeed covered by paragraph 6 of my proposal:
> > 
> >   6. Individual projects and maintainers may ban LLM contributions
> >      completely.  Such bans (including by upstream projects) must be
> >      respected.
> > 
> > So lintian can set a stronger policy.
> > 
> > You're perhaps thinking of 4a.  That is a limited power for moderators
> > to set weaker policy.
> > 
> > My proposal does not allow individual projects to weaken the policy,
> > only strengthen it.  For example, the lintian[1] maintainers aren't
> > allowed to write an exception into their README so they can reply to
> > bug reports with LLM output.
> I was instead looking for the opposite - i.e. allow individual projects
> to be more permissive. I understand that your current proposal does not
> allow that.
> 
> It may be good to have a provision to have individual projects or maintainer
> teams to have policies of their own around AI, which could be different from
> what is enforced on all projects in the project at large.

This does not really work because of human-to-human communications.
Lintian bugs might end up on the debian-bugs-rc@ mailing list, or be
read by other maintainers, so they cannot include LLM output under Ian's
proposal.

Lucas