Opam repository package contributors should have a human behind them

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Dear all,

I wanted to draw your attention to a new bit of opam-repository contribution guidance that we have just included.

  1. Package contributors accounts should have a human behind them

The review work by the maintainers of opam-repository is carried out by humans, and we need to have a contact to respond to our feedback.

Reasoning:

  • A proposal for a new package can be submitted from bot accounts, but the PR should be tagged with a human contact so the opam-repo maintainers know who to talk to.
  • Subsequent discussions regarding the PR should avoid excessive noise, such as large LLM-generated responses or automated triage logs, to avoid overloading the maintainers.
  • Any machine generated comments on a package publication PR must be explicitly identified as such.
  • When human reviewers ask questions or provide guidance, they must be met with human replies.

The motivation here is twofold: we have a small but growing number of submissions from projects that have bot-based release procedures. In several cases, this means we’ve had to dig out who the responsible person actually is.

And of course, there’s more and more LLM spam out there waiting to spring on our poor human faces, but the submissions PRs have so far been largely considerate. Let’s keep that going! Feedback welcome as always and the PR discussion here for those interested, and keep those opam package submissions coming :slight_smile:

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