Namespaces for Lintian Tags
Hi,
The Lintian team has been working hard to make Lintian better. Some
call it a policy enforcer, but from our perspective Lintian just
provides friendly packaging advice for the benefit of maintainers.
A pending change may affect anyone who looks at Lintian's output. We
would like to get your thoughts before taking the next step.
I am about to introduce private namespaces for tags. Many tags already
point to the check that issued them. (For those who don't know, a
'check' in Lintian is a module that issues a tag.) Namespaces would
formalize the relationship.
For example, the tag
'debian-copyright-file-uses-obsolete-national-encoding' might become
'national-encoding@debian/copyright'.
There are many motivations:
1. Shortens tag names.
2. Points to the code that issued the tag.
3. Frees up name space (good tags are rare).
4. Multiple checks can use the same tag in different contexts (i.e. 'spelling').
5. Preempts name conflicts in case some check-writing is delegated to
expert teams.
6. Quicker to split large checks when components reuse tag names.
7. Brings consistency between Lintian and custom profile users, such
pkg-perl-tools and pkg-js-tools, who already have private namespaces.
The change is technically easy. (Lintian even has a way to track
renamed tags for overrides.) On an optical level, however, the change
will affect a lot of people. It could even cause headaches for some
users, for example in derivatives. We would like to solicit your
input.
Please provide your thoughts, perspectives and suggestions by amending
the bug report at #943525. Thank you!
Kind regards,
Felix Lechner
P.S. If you run Lintian in a GNOME terminal, you should now see some hyperlinks.
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