Re: Keepassxc hard masked, why ?

On 4/17/26 10:17 AM, Lilia Marina Jiménez Redondo wrote:
>> The AI policy isn't about software merely packaged by Gentoo (e.g 
>> the Linux kernel), but about the software that's part of Gentoo's 
>> infrastructure.
> 
> Part of the reason why I thought that AI use upstream was partly the
> reason for the masking was because there was a mention of AI in the
> Masks message. Thanks for the clarification :)


Use of LLM vibe coding is a factor that can influence the gentoo
maintainer's beliefs regarding whether the package is low quality enough
that it might not be worth packaging at all.

If not that, then at least that the maintainer is no longer willing to
maintain it, and the package flips over to "maintainer-needed" status.
That is a risky place to be, because packages which are
maintainer-needed are eligible for last-rites and removal from Gentoo on
the grounds that "this package requires work in order to be usable and
that work isn't happening, we are removing the package because it
doesn't work anymore".

Some packages, like dev-python/chardet, have been rewritten from scratch
as vibe coded in newer versions. And we don't package them at all past
that point, but that is less because of the LLM and more because... the
package is exceedingly rude and disrespectful towards the original author.

Or dev-python/autobahn, which has a mask message as follows:

# Upstream has switched to LLM-first coding which has already caused
# a number of suspicious bugs.  At this point, new versions
# of the packages cannot be trusted to be safe to use.  Furthermore,
# the maintenance cost of dealing with packaging bugs alone
# is overwhelming to human maintainers of this package.

That is, here the practical effects of LLM coding have kicked in, and
the package is such low quality that we tried and failed to package it
because it was broken, and gave up because the upstream developer used
an LLM to hallucinate the cause of the bug, write a patch which didn't
fix the bug, and respond to the Gentoo reporter by saying "we fixed the
problem" and closing the report when it wasn't in fact fixed or even
looked at.

So, yes, packages can be removed from Gentoo because their upstream
developers use LLMs to develop it. They just aren't removed "because
violating the LLM ban".


-- 
Eli Schwartz

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