Proposed consensus: reporting lintian overrides

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> writes:
> Russ wrote:

>> * 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?

> As you might expect (as I was the requester for this feature) I'd
> *really* prefer the former option. My initial reasoning for it is that I
> want to make it immediately visible to sponsors if a package has
> suppressed lintian warnings. If it's not the default behaviour to list
> them, then I'd be worried that some people just won't notice.

I'm getting ready to upload the new version of lintian, so it's time to
declare what the consensus seems to be so that I can implement it.

Interestingly, no one option emerged strongly.  People seem to be split
almost evenly three ways: want the messages by default, don't want them by
default, or want them but only one line per run.

Accordingly, I'm going to modify lintian to print out only one line per
run showing the totals of the overrides for the entire run, on the grounds
that for more details, well, that's what --show-overrides is for.  I think
this should make both the "want this" and the "want this but it's noisy"
folks happy.

For those who really don't want to see this line at all, I'll add a -q
option to lintian that suppresses this line (and anything else like this
that comes up later, if we have anything).

Does that sound consistent with the sentiments on the thread to everyone?

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