Re: The wider implications of stuffing the NEW queue with issues it was not designed for.

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Julien BLACHE <jblache@debian.org> writes:

> We sure have a few people that would blindly add overrides rather than
> fixing the actual cause of the lintian warning/error. No doubt about
> that.

This might be a symptom of the wider problem, that people see Lintian
not as a series of warning lights indicating probable problems with the
package, but rather as “a deity to be appeased”, in the words of Al
Viro <URL:http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/831034>.

There are a great many Debian changelog messages along the lines of
“made change foo to keep Lintian happy” as though that were the only
readon why such a change would be beneficial. Apart from being bloody
useless, that kind of changelog message strongly implies that the writer
hasn't bothered to understand why Lintian was programmed to complain
about the issue in the first place.

I don't know what more can be done about this; heck, Lintian itself has
an easily-accessed detailed explanation attached to every one of its
tags that explains why fixing the issue that triggered that tag is of
interest not to Lintian, but to the project at large.

-- 
 \         “It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival |
  `\                                   value.” —Arthur C. Clarke, 2000 |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney