Re: Number of options

Lucas Nussbaum <[email protected]> Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:09:44 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 13/08/26 at 18:28 +0200, Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2026 at 06:15:36PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> 
> > So your take is that ignoring Kurt's email about devotee's support for
> > votes with >9 options would contribute to building community?
> > 
> > (And no, I had no time to look at devotee manually, and I doubt that it
> > would have triggered a lot of interest from others, given it only saw 11
> > commits since 2017)
> 
> My take is that you keep ignoring people who repeatedly tell you that
> using LLMs to contribute to this specific discussion feels
> disrespectful to a significant part of its participants.

You are discussing a contribution to devotee that was triggered by a
message in that discussion, and then mentioned in my message in that
discussion. My message in that discussion was entirely human-written
with no AI assistance, so I think it would fit within proposal C's
rules, for example. Of course you are free to believe that the rules set
by proposal C are insufficient.  We are having a GR precisely to
determine the project's positioning on this.

> Kurt's problem is a different problem. My specific take there is that
> Kurt shouldn't be left alone maintaining devotee.
> 
> The outcome of your LLM usage, that I can see, is that Kurt is left
> alone maintaning devotee plus a new patch to integrate.
> 
> My growing feeling that LLM usage in Debian destroys community grows
> with another data point.

My take is different: in that case I see AI as a useful tool to get an
understanding of devotee, and to get onboarded. In about two hours of
work, I could get an understanding of how devotee works, add a test (it
has no real test suite), and identify two places that need fixes for
votes with >9 options. Initially I only planned to produce an analysis
(AGENTS.md and doc/max-options.md in my commits) -- that would be
allowed by proposal G -- but then decided to also add a test suite and
patches that fixed the identified issues.  [this is something I dislike
about proposal G: once you have the complete analysis, it feels a bit
artificial to not go the last mile and generate the patch and test it]

I honestly don't know if I'll contribute to devotee in the future, or if
this is just a drive-by contribution. But even if LLMs make drive-by
contributions easier, some contributors will stick around and do more
than a single drive-by contribution, creating communities around
software projects -- especially those that are difficult to get involved
with because they are not well documented, or have no test suite.

So my growing feeling that LLM usage in Debian helps grow the community
now has another data point.

Lucas
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