On Sat, 2025-04-05 at 12:41 +0200, Daniel Gröber wrote: > Hi Ian, Hi all, > > We all know Debian is [dying], right? > > [dying]: https://salsa.debian.org/rafael/debian-contrib-years > > Observation 1: > Young developers don't see Debian as a place where work gets done. > > Observation 2: > Young developers are not lacking motivation to work on FLOSS.
Debian is a solid base system for upper level applications like web server, etc. As time goes by, AIs (including LLMs) will become a key infrastructure of the world. Like it or not, this world trend is destined and inevitable. With this background, I think Debian can continue focusing on maintaining a solid base system. As a plus, we can provide LLM inference libraries through our archive, so Debian integrates better to the world as a part of the future infrastructure. LLM inference libraries are the long term goal of Debian Deep Learning Team, and in the same mailing list we also have Debian ROCm Team to focus on open-source hardware acceleration solution. I'm targeting some kind of out-of-box LLM inference experience through Debian's own archive. That's how I see Debian (as an operating system) can find its place in the AI Era. I do not worry about AI training. Researchers and Engineers can help themselves for their setups, and Debian is in most cases just works as a base system, and nothing more. OK, this just reminded me that the GR-AI-DFSG is still stuck on me. I'll find some time and move forward. > Observation 3: > Young developers can't access the help they need to be effective. My personal experience is that the state of the art LLMs can answer many packaging issues, as long as it is not too difficult. This should be able to relive the young developer's burden on both writing code and reading Debian's documents. Young developers are more likely to accept and learn workflows with LLM integration. So I don't think introductory level of help is a concern. The real concern is the cases when real human expert is needed. Like tutoring FTP trainees. LLMs will largely be a disaster for such case.
