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mono442

why don't they leverage ai for maintaining packages?

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https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.

Pretty rich from a compile-from-source distribution

The main problems seem to be that it takes a long time to build all combinations of USE flags and that users complain that volunteers are not working fast enough, causing annoyance of the maintainers. Can you explain how AI would help here?

ai can work test the options and fix the builds

You still need the hardware resources to do builds. And thanks to Slop Generator providers gobbling up alllllllll the RAM and storage they can get their icky hands on, it simply practically infeasible for everyone not affiliated with a tech BigCo.

Yep.

A dumb-as-rocks tinderbox can do the task of "build the thing in all valid configurations". Good luck getting the hardware needed to do all that testing in a timely manner on an -IIRC- 15K USD budget, or finding people to volunteer it in this economy. And good fucking luck getting LLMs to do the diagnostics, writeups, and -most importantly- shepherding required to get the bugs your testing reveals actually fixed in upstream.

Upstream not giving much of a fuck about whether anything other than Google® Chrome™ can be produced from Chromium is a big part of the reason it's being dropped from Gentoo. And yes, I 110% agree that Google is totally entitled to give zero fucks about non-Google users of Chromium. Gentoo is equally entitled to stop packaging Chromium.

Maintaining Gentoo ebuilds for complex packages such as Chromium is as peak Linux as one can get. You're talking about developers who _often_ discover and then submit upstream patches for the most obscure and difficult bugs that upstream projects haven't heard of. Often because Gentoo users are the only ones trying different compilation options, or they're the first to try building with more modern dependencies than the upstream project has yet attempted.

For just one of many examples, see [1] where the Gentoo developer had to submit a patch upstream for a Chromium build toolchain bug that to 99% of experienced Linux users is bordering on unintelligible due to how much specific knowledge is needed to understand the bug.

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/956054#c2

Most ai wouldn't know how to write a proper ebuild to save their lives.

That's funny cause I use ai to maintain dozens of ebuilds. They are usually one shots.

Cool, you can adopt chromium then!

Problem is solved!

I'd be happy to if I had enough compute to rebuild it 50 times in under an hour.

I tried some months ago, and it'll make a blank one fine, but if you need a complex configure or install phase, I felt I was better off doing it by hand.

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