Hi Michael,
On 23/01/2026 18:50, Michael Tremer wrote:
Hello Adolf,
Thanks for reviewing this.
On 23 Jan 2026, at 17:30, Adolf Belka <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Michael,
On 23/01/2026 15:48, Michael Tremer wrote:
Hello everyone,
While eating my lunch today I stumbled over the AI Usage Policy that the
Ghostty project has come up with. I quite liked it and I think that IPFire
should also have a policy for AI usage in place. We have not received such an
overwhelming amount of AI-generated patches unlike Ghostty and cURL, but we
have received some that have been very low quality and when asked questions,
the person who submitted this patch raised his hands and dropped out. This is
just a waste of time for everyone involved.
This policy that I have slightly adapted for IPFire demands that any kind of AI
usage is allowed, but has to be disclosed. The point is to avoid any kind of
low-quality, time-wasting submissions. I too believe that we should make this
known upfront so that we can all be on the same page and make the job easy for
us in case we need to reject any kind of patch submission.
On the other hand, the policy is encouraging AI usage as there are indeed tasks
where AI can help. But just because it is AI-generated does not mean that
something is good.
I would like you all to have a look at this and see if this is working for you
as well or if you would like to have any changes made to it:
Most of it seems fine to me and I agree with it.
Good!
The only concerns are that it refers to pull requests from external users but
as far as I am aware we generally don't accept pull requests, certainly not in
the GitHub repo. If any IPFire GitHub pull request has any merits then an
IPFire developer has to take the pull request and convert it into an IPFire
patch submission supplied to the IPFire Development mailing list.
The original version used “Pull Request” whenever they talked about a
contribution. We don’t normally use those, certainly not using GitHub.
There is however some documentation about PRs in case there are huge patch
sets. You know well how good Patchwork is with huge patch sets. It is
documented here:
https://www.ipfire.org/docs/devel/git/pull-requests
We pretty much never use this, but that does not mean that we won’t in the
future. So in this sense I kept pull request in one place of the policy.
Actually we are talking about any kind of contribution. I hope the text is
inclusive of all of this.
I feel you are being too optimistic. I suspect any user looking at it will just
think of the GitHub type of Pull Request.
I feel that Pull Request in the two lines in the policy should be replaced by
something related to Patch Submissions.
If the intent of pull request as mentioned in the AI Policy is different than
what I have described above then it is not clear to me from the policy wording.
We definitely don’t mean GitHub PRs. Those are shit and actually a huge
contributor to why so many projects are receiving so many AI slop as they make
these drive-by “contributions” so easy.
Then I would say we should also have a section in the AI policy that says that
we don't accept GitHub Pull Requests whether based on AI or not. Then there
could be a link to the documentation about submitting patches. That way we
close that door also via the AI Policy.
Regards,
Adolf.
-Michael
Regards,
Adolf.
https://www.ipfire.org/docs/devel/ai-policy
All the best,
-Michael
