Hi,
Anyone out here who is familiar with LLMs (or wants to get familiar with
LLMs): How about using it not for coding, but for checking commits that
went into gnulib master?
Since 2026-01-01, at least 17 gnulib commits contained regressions, that
had to be fixed subsequently. We often detect regressions by code review
or by a CI run. The problems:
- Not all commits gets reviewed from a different developer than the
committer. (Like many free software projects, Gnulib lacks good reviewers.)
- The CI runs possibly a week later. (We can't increase the frequency,
because some CI runs fail due to network problems or other noise,
and this noise needs to be filtered out.)
As a complement to these QA techniques, Paul Eggert suggests to use an
LLM to analyze the commits that have been pushed into gnulib master.
This should be promising, because I read recently that LLMs outperform
all classical static analysis tools, when it comes to analyzing source code.
I can't do this myself, because I'm already quite loaded with the existing
QA techniques and with my work on other GNU packages.
Therefore, if you volunteer, please step up!
Bruno
