Re: two more tags
Raphael Geissert <atomo64+debian@gmail.com> writes:
> Why false positives? I mean, I see no reason to ship files that only
> make sense when developing under a Windows system even under
> usr/share/doc; some files are even generated by Visual Studio which have
> a big fat "DO NOT EDIT" warning which I'm not even sure if they can even
> be distributed.
In the abstract, I agree with you. (I'm fairly sure those files are fine
to distribute, though; they're marked that way because they're
automatically generated, but lots of free software projects that support
Windows builds distribute them.) In the concrete, I'm concerned that it's
too much of a nitpick. I know I bang this drum a lot, but Lintian becomes
useless if people won't run it and pay attention to what it says, so I
don't want to issue tags that people feel are just meaningless noise.
I'm not sure where this one falls. If you want to support Windows builds,
those files *could* be useful as part of an example of how to do that.
It's a bit of a stretch, but I can see it.
There was a discussion in debian-devel some time back about how Debian
maintainers should edit out the installation instructions in upstream
README files since that information is useless in an installed Debian
package. That's the sort of corner that I don't want to get us stuck in,
since while all of that is of course perfectly correct, approximately no
one actually does that, and it's work for no real gain for Debian. It's a
lot easier, of course, to exclude a few files from being copied over, but
if people are copying over whole example trees from upstream... I dunno,
it may be fine to warn, but it does make me a little nervous.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: