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.
