Re: Namespaces for Lintian Tags
Hi,
On Wed, 20 Nov 2019, Felix Lechner wrote:
> There are many motivations:
Among those motivations, which one is the one that triggered this process
and which one are there as "additional benefits" that you could identify
to justify the change?
> 1. Shortens tag names.
I don't see that as a benefit, we copy/paste the tags into overrides
or full lines into lintian-info. We rarely need to type them.
> 2. Points to the code that issued the tag.
"grep -r" on the codebase has been working well for me. This mapping
is only really needed when you want to dig into the code anyway.
> 3. Frees up name space (good tags are rare).
Can you show examples of how this would help you concretely?
I have a hard time seeing how difficult it can be to invent
a new name for a new tag.
> 4. Multiple checks can use the same tag in different contexts (i.e. 'spelling').
spelling-error-in-binary
spelling-error-in-description
spelling-error-in-changelog
etc
is perfectly fine.
> 5. Preempts name conflicts in case some check-writing is delegated to
> expert teams.
This is not a real problem, that's the kind of pseudo-benefit that you
try to imagine to justify the change that you want (I have done
that many times ;-)).
> 6. Quicker to split large checks when components reuse tag names.
I don't follow you. For me splitting checks means they get renamed and
thus your tag names are renamed too.
> 7. Brings consistency between Lintian and custom profile users, such
> pkg-perl-tools and pkg-js-tools, who already have private namespaces.
A very minor benefit IMO.
Now can you do the same analysis with the disadvantages?
Since the check is embedded in the tag name:
* It's harder to move a tag from one check to another.
* It's harder to rename a check.
What else can you come up with?
> The change is technically easy. (Lintian even has a way to track
> renamed tags for overrides.) On an optical level, however, the change
I was about to ask for overrides, but this would be a massive usage of
this rename feature and it will confuse many persons. People will start
to use the new name in overrides to avoid this confusion and it won't work
with old lintians (not a big deal but still).
> 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.
What kind of headaches are you referring to?
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
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