Re: Is it the job of Lintian to push an agenda?

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 11:10:36AM -0300, Chris Lamb wrote:
> Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> > P.S.  I'm going to be adding an override in e2fsprogs for
> > package-supports-alternative-init-but-no-init.d-script because it
> > has false positives
> 
> Regardless of the specifics of this particular package if Lintian
> could feasibly not emit this false-positive, would it surely not be
> more sensible to get this fixed there instead?

There is a bug open against Lintian already, but it's not at all clear
it's solveable short of solving the halting problem.  E2fsprogs is
shipping 5 systemd unit files for which the cron.d file is a rough
substitute.  So the only choice is whether you want false positive or
false negative reports for a Lintian "Important" warning.

I'm getting 5 Important Lintian errors, one for each systemd unit
files.  Some of them are associated with a systemd.timer setup, and
some are normal system services unit files.  *All* of them in
combination implement the functionality which is also (mostly)
provided by cron.d entry and the e2scrub_all_cron shell script.

Just suppressing the warning for systemd.timer files would not be
sufficient.  You'd have to suppress *all* Lintian complaints of this
class if there is at least one timer file and at least one cron.d file
in the package.   But that's going to subject to false negatives.

Or, you know, you could solve the halting problem.  :-)

> That would not only be a cleaner solution than an override (which you
> would likely just have to remove later...) it would be a general
> kindness in that it could potentially save countless other developers
> undergoing the same manual process as you.

I prefer not to either (a) delay a release of e2fsprogs until this
Lintian bug is solved, one way or another (and it's not clear it can
be solved easily), or (b) deal with people complaining and filing bugs
regarding the Lintian Important report.

So override does seem to be the best approach, especially given how
charged the whole sysvinit vs systemd controversy and my lack of faith
that the Lintian bug is going to be resovled any time soon.  I'd
*much* rather avoid any flames directed at me caused by this false
positive.

      		 	   	      - Ted