Bug#884499: lintian: Pedantic check for packages not using debhelper or CDBS

[Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com>]

On May 7, 2018 1:26:36 AM UTC, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> writes:
>
>> However, my experience with being an author of a handful of static
>> analysis tools is that people have a slight tendency to delegate
>> thinking to the computer's output. The addition of an objective
>target
>> (ie. zero output) only encourages our post-lapsarian brains to make
>> poor, err, compromises.
>
>> Do correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the angle Scott was
>> pushing. :)
>
>> How could we make --pedantic more useful/obvious/something? 
>Ironically,
>> if it were less useful in a strict sense — for example, if we moved
>some
>> P: tags to I: — it would get less incorrect usage. :p
>
>My modest proposal, and this is going to sound nuts so bear with me for
>a
>moment, would be to make it impossible to get pedantic tags and regular
>tags at the same time.  If you use --pedantic, suppress all other tags.
>
>This problem stems from the fact that people are using Lintian as if
>pickier is better, and the deeper they go into Lintian's settings while
>keeping the package clear of any output, the better the package is. 
>And
>that's true, up to a point -- moving from error to warning is certainly
>significant, and moving from warning to info is probably significant.
>
>But pedantic was a collection of tags that were mostly designed for a
>far
>different purpose: you run them on a package to ask for a set of things
>that might be out of step with common best practices or that you may
>want
>to consider changing if you've not touched the package in years.  It's
>much more of a one-time thing.  You run it, you look at the tags and
>read
>the descriptions (I would argue that --pedantic is basically useless
>without --info, and perhaps --pedantic should force --info,
>particularly
>if one implements my modest proposal), you decide which ones make sense
>and which ones don't, and then you fix the ones you like and move on
>with
>your life.
>
>Lintian has emitted pedantic warnings about some of my packages for not
>having an upstream changelog for literally years.  This is never going
>to
>be fixed; upstream is not going to make a changelog, and I'm not going
>to
>make an artificial one.  The correct disposition of that tag is for me
>to
>ignore it completely, *but it's still useful* for new packages when I'm
>doing initial packaging and may have forgotten to include the right
>debhelper command to copy over upstream's unconventionally-named
>changelog.
>
>If we *force* people to not treat --pedantic the same as other severity
>levels and *force* it to be a separate pass that you only run in
>specific
>situations, maybe this will finally get through to people, since
>arguing
>with people in debian-mentors that they're using Lintian wrong doesn't
>seem to be working.

I think this is an excellent idea.

Thanks,

Scott K