Re: NEW processing

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:

> I submit that lintian warnings are entirely out of scope for the task the
> project has entrusted to the ftp team, and that mentioning this at all as a
> factor in making the NEW queue "painless" indicates there's a problem with
> the process as implemented.
>
> - lintian *warnings* are those points that even the lintian maintainers are
>   not confident are always indicative of bugs.  There's really no reason for
>   the ftp team to look at these as a condition for NEW acceptance.

Minor correction: lintian warnings are those points that the Lintian
maintainers are either not confident are indicative of bugs or indicate
bugs that are not severity important or higher.

> - Even with lintian errors, there are many that are definitely bugs but
>   which should not be grounds for a reject from the archive because they're
>   *minor* bugs, and the ftp team should not be in the business of enforcing
>   lintian cleanness as a condition of acceptance into the archive because
>   this is (and always will be) a false measure of package quality.[1]

There should be no minor-severity bugs that result in lintian errors.  If
there are, that's a bug in Lintian.  Please report it.  The lowest
threshold that produces an E tag is severity: important, likelihood:
possible.

The severity classifications are new, based on a GSoC project by Jordà
Polo (who did an excellent job), and have only been checked over
comprehensively a few times.  There may be misclassifications remaining,
which we'd be happy to fix.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>