Re: Opinions needed: reporting lintian overrides
On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 10:30:09PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> After a recent problem with a package with a fairly egregious error that
> was overridden, hurting the ability of the sponsor to notice it, I added a
> line of output to the default lintian output saying if any package
> overrides error or warning tags.
> As I sort of suspected at the time, someone else has now objected to
> having this output by default on the grounds that the point of the
> override was to shut lintian up and it's easier to verify that lintian
> produces no output.
> I'd really like to not have to make this decision myself. I'd like to get
> opinions and see if a consensus emerges. I personally always run lintian
> with -iI --show-overrides, so I'm clearly not the target audience for this
> feature one way or the other. Here are the options:
> * Show the N: line with a count of overrides per package by default and
> provide an option to suppress this output if someone wants.
> * Don't show the N: line by default and provide an option to turn it on.
> Which should we do?
I have to agree that lintian shouldn't output any noise about overrides by
default. To my mind this partly defeats the purpose of having an override
facility, and I don't think one instance of poor judgement should outweigh
the benefit of being able to spare developers from worrying about lintian
warnings that we know for certain are false-positives.
E.g., this:
N: samba_3.0.28-2.dsc overrode 4 warnings
N: winbind_3.0.28-2_amd64.deb overrode 3 errors, 2 warnings
N: smbfs_3.0.28-2_amd64.deb overrode 2 warnings
N: samba-common_3.0.28-2_amd64.deb overrode 1 warning
N: samba_3.0.28-2_amd64.deb overrode 1 warning
is now half the lintian output for samba, and it's the half that was
deliberately overridden before /so that/ the remaining problems would be
more visible :)
And yes, none of these are overrides to paper over lintian bugs... :)
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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