Re: Certainty and severity levels
Jordà Polo <jorda@ettin.org> writes:
> For severity I'm thinking of using a classification similar to that of
> bugs. The idea is basically the same and developers are already familiar
> with bug severities. Also, it isn't that easy to define severities
> without using those terms, and mixing different classifications could be
> really confusing.
Hm, I think that's a fairly sound idea. Another advantage is that it
gives us a fairly fine-grained classification system that we can grow
into, even if we don't use it all at once.
> One problem, though, is that lintian doesn't cover exactly the same
> range of severities: "wishlist" seems a bit confusing for most checks,
> and there is probably nothing above "serious". (Note that I have not
> read every single lintian check yet, so I may be wrong.)
Bug severities above serious are generally for software malfunctions,
which Lintian can't check for, so that sounds right to me. There are some
wishlist tags (no watch file, for example), but they're relatively rare.
> Following this convention, most of the current E|W|I tags would be
> classified like this:
>
> error: serious, important, normal
> warning: normal, minor
> info: minor, wishlist (?)
That sounds right to me. I wouldn't spend a lot of time distinguishing
between normal and important for the first pass, and most of the info tags
are going to be minor, but I think that's basically the right idea.
> For certainty I prefer a less fine-grained classification, at least for
> now. The main goal is to identify checks that are fully "verifiable", so
> 3 levels are probably enough: high (100% sure the problem is present),
> medium (mostly sure), and low (false positives likely). I'm not
> satisfied at all with the names, but I'm having a hard time trying to
> come up with something better. Suggestions are welcome.
I came up with something a while back, but now I don't remember exactly
what it was. Something like certain, probable, possible, and wild guess.
I'm not sure those names are any better. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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