Re: Time to drop debcheck on optional/extra and arch:all?
* Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org>, 2014-08-10, 12:31:
The distinction between optional and extra is commonly ignored and yet
debcheck continues to add reports to the PTS about packages which have
dependencies which crossover from optional into extra.
Do you mean the "debcheck" link in the "links" box? Or is there another
place where debcheck pops out on PTS that I can't see?
Do we care about any distinction between optional and extra any longer?
I like "extra". If it was used in a policy-compliant way, it would be
more useful than "standard", "important" or "required". But if we decide
to kill it, I'm not going to cry over it.
However, I don't think we should take any decision before we understand
what is the problem size. That is, what is the number of packages that
would have to have their priority adjusted to make all extra<->optional
priority inversions go away? I assume that would be mostly
s/extra/optional/ changes.
A QA nag tool which is so commonly ignored is possibly not even worth
running.
Being wildly ignored is a common property of all QA tools...
And the tool popularity doesn't depend only on the quality of its
checks, but also on the way the results are delivered to maintainers.
debcheck is never going to be successful if the maintainer has to find
the link in the PTS jungle, and then they are presented with something
as concise as this:
https://qa.debian.org/debcheck.php?dist=unstable&package=awesome
To add insult to injury, most likely the maintainer can't do much about
the reported problems themselves, because they should be fixed by
ftp-masters and maintainers of the dependent packages.
--
Jakub Wilk
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