Re: Ballot option: Debian is created by humans

Gard Spreemann <[email protected]> Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:17:35 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Marc Haber <[email protected]> writes:

> On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 04:10:00PM +0200, Gard Spreemann wrote:
>>In order to safeguard the project's mutual understanding, trust and
>>respect, we disallow the output of generative AI as direct contributions
>>to Debian.
>
> This wording leaves HUGE possibilities of interpretation and will therefore
> cause a lot of flamewars.

I don't think this is any more true for this option than for the others,
sadly.

> Claude is not a DD, it therefore cannot contribute directly to Debian. When I
> say "Claude, create a Debian package doing foo and set myself as a Maintainer",
> is that a direct contribution?

Assuming that the software itself already exists upstream and that you
are talking about its Debian packaging: Yes, this is in fact the
archetype of the kind of contribution I had in mind.

Assuming that you start from scratch and write the software itself using
Claude, while doing the Debian packaging part as a human: This is indeed
a loophole – the software itself is now an indirect contribution by
virtue of being upstream. I would find it strange to attempt to forbid a
DD from writing non-Debian software in whatever way they want. And
strange to forbid *just* DD-written upstream software from entering
Debian. So the loophole must remain. I do think people understand that
exploiting this loophole would go against the spirit, if not the letter,
of the GR if this option were adopted.

> Does the direct contribtion become indirect when I fix the Lintian errors that
> Claude causes myself?

No.

> Does it stay a direct contribution when I just prompt Claude to fix
> the Lintian errors?

I think we're talking past each other. And that is of course a sign that
my language in the proposal isn't clear enough.

The distinction between "direct" and "indirect" has nothing to do with
an LLM being used. Those are words I use to try to make it clear that
the proposal doesn't say anything about AI-generated code ending up in
Debian "indirectly" by for example being part of an upstream project
(incidentally: for me, this is just about pragmatism, not a fundamental
difference).

> Does that become indirect again when I review the diff?

You might be interested in Theodore Tso's objections to the proposal. My
answer to this is there are clearly situations where the diff of a fix
made by a human and that of one made by an AI are
indistinguishable. While the proposal does not directly address this, I
do not think that is where we should focus our energy. Assume good
faith, and thus assume the diff represents a human fix (even if it
doesn't).

A mediocre analogy might be a snippet of assembly. If that assembly is
the output of a compiler, we would in Debian prefer to have the source
code the compiler ingested as the actual source code. If that snippet of
assembly is so tiny that a human writing manually and a compiler
compiling must essentially produce the same thing, then I don't think
it's worth arguing over how that snippet was actually produced.


 Best,
 Gard
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