Re: Certainty and severity levels
On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 01:17:21AM +0200, Jordà Polo wrote:
> I have been reviewing lintian checks to find a good way to classify
> them. I still don't have a final proposal, but I would like to get some
> feedback about the possible certainty and severity levels.
I wrote a more detailed description to use as a reference. There may
still be changes in the future if needed, but I plan to use the
following levels for the first pass. Comments and suggestions are always
welcome.
Categorization of Lintian checks
================================
In order to differentiate between various kinds of tags, Lintian
provides additional info for each check. This information can be found
as headers in «checks/*.desc» files. Mandatory headers to classify
checks include severity and certainty.
Severity
--------
Severity represents how grave is the problem that can be detected using
a particular check. Lintian's severities for checks are analogous to the
severities used for bug reports[1], except only a subset of them are
used. The available levels are:
* serious
Severe violation of Debian Policy ("must" or "required" directive).
Examples: debian-changelog-file-missing, no-copyright-file.
* important
Major packaging errors and other policy violations. Examples:
unstripped-binary-or-object, html-changelog-without-text-version.
* normal
General problems and packaging errors. Examples:
old-fsf-address-in-copyright-file, missing-debconf-dependency.
* minor
Issues that do not significantly affect the functionality of the
packaging, and are presumably trivial to fix. Examples:
diff-contains-cvs-control-dir, xs-vcs-header-in-debian-control.
* wishlist
Desired features that do not pose a problem but could improve the
packaging if implemented. Examples: debian-watch-file-is-missing,
source-contains-cvs-control-dir.
Certainty
---------
While the validity of some checks is assured, other tests are known to
produce false positives. This field is used to indicate how secure is
the validity of each check. Certainty levels include:
* certain
The problem is guaranteed to be present. Examples:
debian-changelog-file-missing, no-copyright-file.
* possible
The problem may be present; there is no evidence to confirm it is
not. Examples: possible-debconf-note-abuse,
possible-missing-colon-in-closes.
* wild-guess
The problem is estimated to be present. Examples:
copyright-should-refer-to-common-license-file-for-gpl,
debconf-is-not-a-registry.
1. http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities
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