Notices by Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)

I’ve been working on this cute little 🐑 #Shepherd feature: settings.
https://codeberg.org/shepherd/shepherd/pulls/153#issuecomment-23343229

A service would have settings, which one can inspect, change, and reset to their default value.

This would allow one to fiddle with services at run time lightheartedly.

Bonnes sansculottides à celleux qui célèbrent.

New #Guix Consensus Document submitted by coopi: “Generalize the bootloader subsystem and introduce Guix Bootspec” 👇
https://codeberg.org/guix/guix-consensus-documents/pulls/15

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/117251794290408891

Insightful post that resonates with the discussions we’ve had in Guix on being welcoming to those pushing for LLM use, even if we were going to reject LLM contributions—a difficult question and the experience reported in the blog post provides an answer.

#Guile now requires contributors to agree to a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) and rejects code authored or co-authored by an LLM 👇
https://codeberg.org/guile/guile/src/commit/b52c48a850765ba93d90fa35fbd3eed8356222a2/HACKING#L134-L156

Kudos to Olivier Dion for making it happen!

I was surprised? amazed? to discover that colleagues using #Guix know of this nifty trick to build a package without one of its optional dependencies: ‘--with-input=THE-OPTIONAL-DEP=hello’. 💡

Fellow hacker Timothy Sample gave an amazing talk on bootstrappable builds, that Jake Edge covered with a nice article in LWN:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1088279/

Cc: @reproducible_builds

#bootstrapping #Guix

@cwebber What these calls for inaction have achieved is the “fait accompli”: sooner or later, “generative AI” will have become pervasive in FOSS and the lock-in will be orders of magnitude stronger than that of GitHub, DRMs, CUDA, or any of these “evils” we fought in the past decades.

At that point, whether these orgs take a stand will be irrelevant.

@janneke I was caught by surprise when I understood that many of my peers don’t view genAI as a threat, some of them viewing it as an opportunity. I thought rejection “obviously” derived from free software principles, but evidently it doesn’t.

Maybe that’s our bigger failure after all—to realize we don’t fully understand what our “shared values” are.

@cwebber

The pretty amazing feat that comes with GNOME 49 in #Guix is the gnome-session replacement implemented as a layer above the 🐑 Shepherd:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/noe/gnome-session-shepherd

Kudos to @baleine for pulling it off!

It successfully disentangles this part of GNOME from systemd, and it’s a creative use of the Shepherd!

A funny example: the text recognizes that “the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions” (a euphemism) and then states that Debian will “rely on the judgment and responsibility of its individual contributors”—as if individual contributors would know better than lawyers in this domain.

Disregard of legal issues is more of a detail though.

While the text states that “such tools can substantially improve the productivity of contributors” (which is a subject of debate), what’s telling is what the text doesn’t even mention: the “externalities”, the environmental and social impact of these services.

And that’s probably the crux of the split among free software people on this matter: are our development efforts made in a vacuum?

It’s not new: whether, for instance, to use BitKeeper for Linux development led to similar debates.

The difference here is that LLMs are not even “just a tool” in the sense BK was: the lock-in is going to be much deeper, in our organizations and in our brains. LLMs threaten the ideal of knowledge sharing and the social fabric we’ve built.

I’m not a Debian contributor and not a user anymore but I’ve always viewed Debian as a lighthouse for free software and for collective self-determination.

I’m afraid about the signal this vote is sending to the free software community at large; I’m afraid of it moving the Overton window further towards disregard for humans and for the climate change emergency, in a selfish and myopic way that we’ll regret.

So Debian adopted a resolution on the use of “generative AI”:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002#texte

Condorcet spoke: of all the options put to the vote, it must be a good compromise, an average of where the community stands.

How much of a compromise is it really, though?

🧵

The message of this resolution is that it’s neither “pro” nor “anti”: it’s neutral, promoting “responsible use”.

In fact, it looks like an example of “extreme centrism”: “Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI”, “Contributors are expected to exercise appropriate care”, “[t]his resolution therefore affirms that generative AI is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules”.

The narrative seems to be: “AI” is just another tool, nothing changes here—move along.

Under the guise of neutrality, what it actually does is open the gates to genAI-produced contributions. This, is political.

The “responsible use” narrative shifts responsibility from the group to the individual. It’s not unlike the tobacco industry’s strategy—or indeed that of the “AI” industry.

Just read that about 40% of alive human beings use the fucking WhatsApp.

“Interesting” when you think that communication infrastructures were initially built by a bunch of folks focusing on freedom and resilience.

@shepherd UX design, sure.

But the problem is political: this concentration of power, disregard for privacy, and ultimately control over the population should be forbidden. At the very least, interoperability should be mandatory for all the so-called “platforms”.

The solution cannot be purely technical.

🐑 #Shepherd, not robot. 🤖
https://shepherding.services/news/2026/08/shepherd-not-robot/