Bug#627216: lintian: symbols-declares-dependency-on-other-package sort of false positive

[Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.0
Severity: minor

A while ago I added a symbols file for libx11-6.  Now, Xlib being of a
certain age, it has exported symbols that should really not be public,
but everyone's too afraid of breaking obscure stuff that may have come
to rely on them anyway.  So instead of hiding these symbols, I've made a
sweep through the Debian archive to see exactly which of them were used,
and in the symbols file I've used:

libX11.so.6 libx11-6 #MINVER#
| libx11-private

and then public symbols get
 public_symbol@Base version
while private symbols get
 private_symbol@Base 0 1

This way a package referencing one of the private symbols gets an
(unsatisfiable) dependency on libx11-private, and it gets caught
immediately.  Unfortunately this trick triggers a lintian warning.  I'm
wondering if I should be overriding it or if there's a way to make an
exception in lintian directly.

Cheers,
Julien