Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes: > * Provide a way to more clearly indicate Lintian's certainty, the severity > of the problem, and the source of the rule that Lintian is checking, > rather than always collapsing that information into a simple three-level > error/warning/info hierarchy. This would allow users to, for example, > see only the tags where Lintian is certain there is a problem, or easily > ignore tags for aesthetic issues that aren't violations of technical > requirements. This sort of additional granularity is a necessary > prerequisite for running Lintian on all uploaded packages and rejecting > on serious Lintian errors, something that's been oft-proposed. FWIW, two years ago (?) Jeroen, djpig and I had a discussion about this. The basic idea back then was the same as you describe now: Move away from "E", "W" and "I" and use two letters to indicate the two different measurements are represented: (i) How certain lintian is: Some checks are heuristics, in other cases lintian is absolutely sure. (ii) How "bad" a problem is. A spelling mistake (kde instead of KDE) is a bug - on the other hand, broken shlibs handling might be harder to detect, but leads to actual problems. I don't have notes from that meeting (and I think there were never any notes published), so the rest of > * Better information retrieval, and caching, of lab information during > checks. Right now, all of Lintian's check scripts repeatedly open and > reopen files in the laboratory and reparse data in each check script. > Instead, that data could be loaded on demand and then cached in case > another check script needed it. ACK. Let's get rid of the lab idea, it doesn't help to make lintian easier. While we are at it, we could also finally document what data is collected by lintian in what format. I sometimes need to create a static lab, check a package and look at the unpack results to find out what is already collected. Another idea discussed in that meeting two years ago was to extend lintian by adding a second tool using pbuilder/piuparts for some checks that require data from other packages. This would of course require net access (or at least access to a Debian mirror), but would finally allow to fix the twenty-something wontfix bugs that require access to other packages. Anyway, the mail looks fine, please go ahead and post it to dda. Marc -- BOFH #71: The file system is full of it
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