Re: Is it the job of Lintian to push an agenda?
Jérémy Lal wrote:
> "Is it the job of Lintian to push an agenda?"
> is a good question, and it would be nice to get a general answer,
> separately from the technical issue about sysvinit scripts.
Difficulties are always inherent in shipping any opinionated linter to
people with a wide spectrum of motivations and ideas. Furthermore, if
it becomes pervasive then there is not only a risk of its output being
followed without attention, when interpreted as a kind of de-facto
policy there is an additional a danger of it being beaten from a
plowshare back into a sword on contentious issues.
As the first line of defense to the above, Lintian reflects the
positions taken and espoused in our official Policy and should [0]
always defer to that esteemed text.
It therefore follows that if the Debian Policy decrees a certain
direction and Lintian mirrors that then in the rare cases of dissent
or disagreement the right and proper course of action is to re-raise
it via Policy and its various appeal processes. If that is not
possible then that is a regrettable state of affairs, but Lintian is
not the venue to stage one's passive-aggressive proxy war on
controversial and highly-charged issues within Debian and its
maintainers have neither the strength, stomach nor spoons for such
maneuevers.
As Sean implies in an adjacent message, all of the above is compounded
by there being a number of recommendations that are considered to be
good practice by most [1] but are not part of Policy (and most should
or can never be). Lintian's various severity levels ("E:", "W:", "I:",
etc), as well as responding to cordial and reasonable requests to
adjust these do allow it to address, albeit extremely clumsily, the
extremely wide spectrum involved here.
As a postscript, it seems like the term "agenda" was a regrettable
choice for this thread given that it carries an implication of
underhanded and dishonest motives. As I am certain that would never be
the intention of my dear colleagues, to avoid any possible
misinterpretations for the remainder of my message I have adopted
alternative terms instead.
[0] Or, if you may excuse an RFC2119 pun, "MUST"...
[1] Feel free to dilute to taste with similar terms.
Regards,
--
,''`.
: :' : Chris Lamb
`. `'` lamby@debian.org 🍥 chris-lamb.co.uk
`-
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