Comment by mono442

3 days ago

why don't they leverage ai for maintaining packages?

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.

      1 reply →

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