Re: Ballot option: Debian is created by humans

Gard Spreemann <[email protected]> Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:17:29 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Gunnar Wolf <[email protected]> writes:

> Gard Spreemann dijo [Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 10:17:35AM +0200]:
>>> 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.
>
> What do you think about other software-written packaging? i.e. about
> packages created by our usual dh-make-* tools? I have used them quite
> a bit. Of course, I do take a look (and fill in with more data where
> needed). I have even written one dh-make-*¹ tool several years ago; I
> didn't use it much for Debian work IIRC, but had quite a large
> deployment of debianized Drupal modules at a private apt repo.
>
> ¹ https://manpages.debian.org/testing/dh-make-drupal/dh-make-drupal.1.en.html
>
> Yes, it would be excessive to label dh-make-* as “rule-based expert
> systems”, but to an extent... yes, it's a software-based shortcut that
> saved me a lot of time filling in very repeatable packaging patterns.

I don't see these as anywhere near causing the same asymmetry in effort
as AI tools.

Maybe I'm being too simplistic in my thinking.


 Best,
 Gard

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 857 B)