Re: Namespaces for Lintian Tags
On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 09:55:04AM -0800, Felix Lechner wrote:
[...]
> 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.
I do not see how that is a good thing.
"debian-copyright-file-uses-obsolete-national-encoding" is a sentence, which
inherently makes it extremely human-readable. For a tool that is
primarily meant to validate the output of a human, this is an immensely
useful feature.
"national-encoding@debian/copyright" is not very useful in that respect, and is
a huge step backwards IMO.
> 2. Points to the code that issued the tag.
While I can see how that might be useful from a lintian maintainer's
point of view, this is not really of benefit to the majority of users of
lintian.
> 3. Frees up name space (good tags are rare).
This of course *does* make sense.
> 4. Multiple checks can use the same tag in different contexts (i.e.
> 'spelling').
Don't see that as a benefit, tbh.
> 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.
These make sense, I guess.
I guess namespacing things might have some limited benefit, I suppose.
But I like that a plain "lintian" run provides enough context for most
people to understand what's going on, without having to use
lintian-info. Same for lintian overrides.
Please don't break that.
HTH,
[...]
--
To the thief who stole my anti-depressants: I hope you're happy
-- seen somewhere on the Internet on a photo of a billboard
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