Re: About new source formats for packages without patches

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

I revisited both the Lintian tag and the long description in light of this
discussion and some private feedback, and for the next release of Lintian
have tentatively made the following changes:

* The tag was previously severity: normal.  Lintian tag severities should
  match bug severities were one to file a bug about the tag, and I think
  everyone would agree that no one would file a normal severity bug about
  this at this point.  I've changed the severity to wishlist instead,
  which I think more accurately reflects the current severity of this
  request.  I should have caught that originally; almost all submitted
  tags for Lintian require some tweaking to the certainty and severity.

* I've revised the long description to try to make it come across as less
  insistent, as several people weren't very happy with the wording.  It
  now says:

N: missing-debian-source-format
N:
N:   To allow for possible future changes in the default source format,
N:   explicitly selecting a source format by creating debian/source/format
N:   is recommended.
N:   
N:   If you don't have a reason to stay with the old format for this
N:   package, please consider switching to "3.0 (quilt)" (for packages with
N:   a separate upstream tarball) or to "3.0 (native)" (for Debian native
N:   packages).
N:   
N:   If you wish to keep using the old format, please create that file and
N:   put "1.0" in it to be explicit about the source package version. If
N:   you have problems with the 3.0 format, the dpkg maintainers are
N:   interested in hearing, at debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org, the
N:   (technical) reasons why the new formats do not suit you
N:   
N:   Refer to the dpkg-source(1) manual page and
N:   http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/DebSrc3.0 for details.
N:   
N:   Severity: wishlist, Certainty: certain

I hope this is a reasonable compromise between the various stances on the
new source format.  None of this is set in stone, or has gone anywhere
other than the Lintian Git repository, and we can definitely change it
further based on additional feedback.

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