Lintian ERROR saying dpatch is obsolete

[Margarita Manterola <margamanterola@gmail.com>]

Hey,

Recently [1], dpatch's maintainer uploaded a new version indicating
that dpatch is now deprecated.  Following that, he filed a bug [2] so
that lintian might warn that dpatch's makefile has been deprecated
since 2003, and that dpatch itself is now deprecated.  However, he
also stated that he plans to keep dpatch for wheezy.

[1]: http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/dpatch/news/20111024T000209Z.html
[2]: bugs.debian.org/646420

A week ago [3], a new lintian version was uploaded that gives an error
if a package build-depends on dpatch, because it's 'obsolete'.

[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/lintian/news/20111121T230326Z.html

I find this a bit shocking, since an error with lintian tends to be
quite a big deal, and there are currently more than a thousand
packages that build-depend on dpatch. It's been only a month since the
upload stating that it's deprecated, and it's still going to be there
for wheezy... Wouldn't it be better to make it a warning now, and an
error after wheezy is released?

I'm CCing debian-devel mainly so that other maintainers of 1087
packages build-depending on dpatch find out about this deprecation.
Finding out about it through a lintian error was quite surprising to
me.

-- 
Besos,
Marga