Bug#401881: archive section mismatch is over-zealous

[bdale@gag.com (Bdale Garbee)]

Package: lintian

I believe the change in lintian responding to bug #394720 is over-zealous,
because I believe it should be a warning and not an error for a single source 
package to deliver binary packages into both main and contrib.  We have a few
legitimate packages in the archive where the source is in main and delivers
binary packages to both main and contrib.  This usually happens when the 
source itself is DFSG-compliant, but some non-free tool is required to build
some optional part of the package.  

The gnuradio package is one such example, where the usrp-firmware package 
delivers FPGA bitstrings for download to a peripheral built from DFSG-compliant 
sources that require a non-free tool from Altera to generate the bitstrings for 
the device.  Upstream therefore provides both the source and the resulting 
freely-redistributable bitstrings as part of their source package.

While it might seem "cleaner" in some sense to split such packages into two
separate source packages, there is no clear need to do so since the 
requirements for sources in main and contrib are identical, unlike non-free.
Diverging from upstream structuring of a source package when we don't need to 
just makes extra work for the maintainer and increases the chances of 
introducing synchronization issues.

Since it's still worth making sure the maintainer knows what they're doing in
such cases, I think the right thing for lintian to do is to treat a single 
source package delivering binaries into main and contrib as a warning, and a 
single source package delivering binaries into non-free and anything else as 
an error.

Bdale