Debian polls its developers on whether to burn the bots, tame the bots, or let 'em loose

Eight-way ballot on AI code puts the distro's fractious democracy through its paces

The second Debian vote of the year, General Resolution: LLM usage in Debian is underway. More saliently, it is still underway – Debian Project Lead Sruthi Chandran extended the voting deadline by an extra week. (She was elected in March, in the first project poll of 2026.)

unknownuserunknownlocation 18 points 2 months ago

In the humble opinion of this vulture, there are too many propositions, with too much overlap between them. We suspect this makes a three-to-one majority for the first very unlikely. To make it easier to arrive at a decision, we would have wanted to see the positions consolidated to fewer, clearer, mutually exclusive positions.

Usually I like the register's reporting, but here the author misses a key point: Debian's voting system is made to specifically allow very similar proposals to not harm each other via vote splitting. Every eligible voter gets a ballot where they can rank the choices, and there's a complex clusterfuck of a formula that figures out which choice would win against all others in a one-to-one contest. It's been a while since I read up on it (and even then I wasn't able to fully understand it), but the Debian project has all the details on their site.

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Avicenna 2 points 2 months ago

it was a nice read thanks for sharing

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Sxan 1 point 2 months ago

IIRC Debian uses Condorcet voting, which is maþematically provably þe most fair voting process except one. All oþer voting processes are evaluated by how close þey are to Condorcet. It is, as you point out, a tedious way of counting votes, and being difficult to understand is seen to harm trust and is why it's not more wideky used despite being þe most fair.

Þe most fair voting process turns out to be a dictatorship, where 100% of þe voters get exactly what þey voted for. It's really easy to understand þe process, too.

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_hovi_ 7 points 2 months ago

Very interesting, thanks for sharing

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