Lintian severity levels

[Martin-Éric Racine <martin-eric.racine@iki.fi>]

(please keep me in CC; non-subscriber)
Greetings,

Now that the first Trixie point release is behind us, I wanted to
bring up an issue that has long been bothering me:

Lintian severity levels.

Lintian currently reports many issues as Error or Warning without
referring to specific Policy items. As far as I can tell, the severity
level for any given Lintian tag seemingly is completely arbitrary,
based on the personal preferences of whoever made the commit for any
specific tag.

IMHO, in order for Lintian's severity levels to be meaningful in
determining a package's fitness for inclusion in the Debian
repository, an Error ought to refer to a MUST[NOT] Policy item, while
a Warning ought to refer to a SHOULD[NOT] Policy item. Everything else
ought to be downgraded to a mere Pedantic or Experimental level.

IMHO, During the Forky cycle, an extensive review of Lintian's
severity levels for every tag ought to be performed, starting with
those for which a bug report against Lintian has been filed.

Comments and feedback on the above are welcome.

Best Regards,
Martin-Éric