While I'm perfectly on the same page with the critics of the LLM generated summaries, I'm a bit torn on the issue.
For anyone not familiar with Debian ecosystem, there's a helper tool called Lintian. Lintian does all kinds of checks from package formatting, licenses to dependency management (which can detect both unnecessary yet included and necessary but missing dependencies via static analysis of your tool if necessary).
It's expected that your package to be "Lintian clean" to be able to included in Debian with minimum friction and wait. Even though it's Lintian clean, your package also checked by teams which are severely understaffed, and composed solely of voluntary people.
NEW queue also receives tremendous influx of packages (which can be considered a torrent, even). Since noon, there are 10 more ITP (intention to package) bugs open in my inbox.
As a result, at one hand, these people need every help they can get because getting new trainees and getting them to learn the intricacies is hard, on the other hand LLM generated text rightfully generate negative reactions from people. However, giving developers an automated check of what looks right and what looks wrong is helpful, in my perspective.
I wonder what people would have said it was a deterministic tool generating these reports and sending people these summaries as a "hey consider this feedback until a human has time to see your package".
This is a hard question and we need to think before impulsive reactions. I even don't have all or any of the answers, but at least I have some insight why this is there.
[–] monegator 3 days ago
[–] bayindirh 3 days ago
Debian has an extensive toolchain to check things. Having a set of deterministic tools which feed LLM with data can be beneficial, though.
Again, I'm not defending the LLM here, just want to show how hard the problem is to begin with.
[–] khaelenmore 2 days ago
If there are deterministic tools involved - just return their output as is. It's usually quite readable if needs a bit of adjusting
[–] pantalaimon 2 days ago