Re: About new source formats for packages without patches
Colin Tuckley <colint@debian.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Yes. I explicitly declined to add a Lintian tag warning about all use
>> of format 1.0 because I don't believe there's consensus to deprecate
>> it. But the request to note the format explicitly seemed reasonable to
>> me.
> I disagree - my packages are in source format 1, I should *not* have to
> do *anything* to them to say that and if Lintian warns me about them
> being in sf1 and not saying so then that is a bug in Lintian.
> It should *never* be a requirement of an existing system that it be
> changed to state that it is such just because a newer system exists.
Well, certainly the goal of Lintian is not to produce tags for which the
project consensus is that nothing should be done about. If people don't
feel like this is a good idea, we can remove it. It made sense to me
personally, but that isn't a deciding criteria.
My main goal with Lintian is to help people catch latent bugs in their
packages, which includes some degree of future-proofing. But if it warns
about things people are adamant about not changing, or find pointless,
then they stop running it and then it doesn't achieve *any* of its goals.
This is always a tradeoff, so it's hard to make decisions based on a small
number of opinions (see previous discussion of Standards-Version), but I
want to try to balance the tradeoff as well as possible.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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