Re: Lintian tag classification (was: Bits from the Lintian maintainers)

[Jordà Polo <jorda@ettin.org>]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 04:36:24PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I think that you will find it easier to do the work incrementally if you
> keep Type as-is and add a new header containing this information.  We can
> then run Lintian in either mode and compare the results for a while before
> retiring the old classification system and rebasing it on the new tags.
> Otherwise, it becomes a single flag-day change, and those are always
> harder to pull off.

I agree working incrementally makes sense here. Even if I were to
implement the keywords list, the plan is to keep the behaviour of
Lintian unchanged until the new classification is "ready".
 
> Otherwise, this is more general than I had been planning but still seems
> fundamentally sound.  I think it's worth considering, given that we
> already have a field syntax where it's very easy to add more fields,
> whether it makes sense to use keywords instead of just adding more
> fields.  In other words, rather than having:
> 
>     Type: severity::error, certainty::wild-guess, origin::policy
> 
> you could have:
> 
>     Severity: error
>     Certainty: wild-guess
>     Origin: policy
> 
> and use more of the existing parsing infrastructure without having to
> handle the keywords separately.

I actually don't have a strong opinion about it. I asked in part because
I don't really know if there will be need for more categories in the
future, but I guess it is hard to tell.

Your mail made me change my opinion about using new fields, but as you
said, this is a rather specific detail. There is no need to decide right
now.

> Taking a step back from the specific details, I see this work as having
> three basic steps.  This is just my view on it, though, and you may want
> to do it differently.

My view isn't that different. A fourth step I also thought about is
enhancing lintian.debian.org to support the new classification, but it
probably isn't a "basic" step.

Thanks for your comments, they are really appreciated. You helped me
solve a few misunderstandings I had, and made me realize about some
flaws in my proposal.