Re: [PATCH 0/3] treewide: migrate from legacy utime.h to utimensat

[Weijie Yuan <wy@wyuan.org>]

[+cc Johannes Schindelin]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2026 at 10:59:09AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:
> 
> > On 2026-08-21 at 14:23:20, Alexey Samsonov via GitGitGadget wrote:
> >> This change is generated by Gemini Flash from Antigravity, but all the code
> >> has been manually verified by me, and, where applicable, adjusted to match
> >> the existing behavior as closely as possible.
> >
> > Unfortunately, I don't think that's allowed.  From SubmittingPatches[0]:
> >
> >     The Developer's Certificate of Origin requires contributors to certify
> >     that they know the origin of their contributions to the project and
> >     that they have the right to submit it under the project's license.
> >     It's not yet clear that this can be legally satisfied when submitting
> >     significant amount of content that has been generated by AI tools.
> >
> > I therefore haven't read this series to avoid being influenced by code
> > we're not allowed to include.
> >
> > [0] https://git-scm.com/docs/SubmittingPatches#ai
> 
> Your stance, as I understand it, is that Alexey's DCO is not valid
> because, acting as a copy editor of Antigravity/Gemini's work,
> Alexey cannot possibly know where the code was copied from.  And we
> cannot accept work that is not covered by a valid DCO.
> 
> I think that is a much more prudent attitude than being cavalier
> about legal issues.  I used to think, "Hey, the person claims in the
> DCO that the code is appropriately licensed, so if it turns out to
> be a false claim later, that is his or her problem, not ours."
> 
> But that is not how things work.
> 
> If work submitted under a DCO later turns out to be based on
> something we cannot legally use, the submitter may of course be in
> trouble, but we would also need to bear the cost of ripping it out;
> the later we discover the problem, the more substantial the effort
> necessary to deal with the fallout will be.

Sorry to interject here, but I seem to remember that dscho already has a
few commits with an Assisted-by trailer that have made it into master.
I´m not entirely sure what kind of assistance he received either, but as
you suggest, it seems better to mention this here sooner rather than
later.

(I also mentioned this part here [1], with full respect to Johannes)

> Stepping back a bit, though, is the situation really all that
> different between a relatively new author who discloses their use of
> AI and another author similarly unknown to us who claims it is all
> their own work?  Either way, if the code turns out to be unusable,
> we would still be on the hook for participating in the infringement
> and would bear the cost of ripping it out.

> What worries me a bit is that there may not be much difference
> between "you said that you relayed AI output, so we won't talk to
> you" and "we do not know you well enough to trust you, so we won't
> talk to you".

But I think that, from Linus's point of view, the chain of trust matters
more than whether AI was used in the first place:

| So AI giveth, and AI taketh away. But the basic issue shouldn't be AI
| per se, it should be that notion of "trust". [2]

Of course, I also understand that the Git community doesn't need to
completely follow the rules from kernel community.

Thanks.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/aorxVo_6_U1ceaKm@wyuan.org/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=wgbGarE7Ozw4VG6oUKDj9pk-8DRoDiX00bo1MwEMm9UWQ@mail.gmail.com/