Re: Intended MBF: maintainer scripts not starting on #!
Ralf Treinen <treinen@free.fr> writes:
> in the Colis project (which aims at analyzing maintainer scripts) we
> found 39 maintainer scripts in stable which do not start on #!. The
> list is attached. Policy 6.1 says about maintainer scripts:
> if they are scripts (which is recommended), they must start with the
> usual #! convention.
> Any objection against filing bugs against the offending packages? Since
> policy says "must", severity=serious would be in order, right?
In this case, I don't think one can justify severity higher than normal.
Not all Policy "must" violations are serious. I think serious should be
reserved for things that cause user-visible breakage, and this only
affects the rather unusual use case of running the maintainer script
manually.
(We unfortunately don't have good language for this in Policy. Right now,
the must/should distinction conflates two things: severity, and certainty.
We used to have the same problem in Lintian and explicitly split severity
and certainty so that we could talk about them independently. This
requirement is a "certainty: certain, severity; normal" sort of thing,
which is occasionally represented with "must" in Policy right now.
It doesn't help that anyone from an IETF background will be used to using
MUST for certainty instead of severity.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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