Re: Lintian severity levels

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Hello,

Martin-Éric Racine, le sam. 27 sept. 2025 09:41:58 +0300, a ecrit:
> 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,

I don't think lintian errors are supposed to match policy items.
While lintian fatal errors (used by ftpmaster to reject package) can,
indeed.

I mean, I don't think we'll try to encode in the policy all pieces that
we know are errors that will hit us somehow and we want to highlight to
maintainers. Just taking the first tag I see coming:

Just taking the first example I can find in the tags:

Tag: apache2-configuration-files-need-conf-suffix
Severity: error
Check: apache2
Explanation: The package is installing an Apache2 configuration but that file does not
 end with a '<code>.conf</code>' suffix. Starting with Apache2 2.4 all configuration
 files except module '<code>.load</code>' files need that suffix or are ignored otherwise.

This is clearly an error that we want to highlight, while not actually
being a problem for inclusion in debian, so won't be covered by the
policy.

Samuel