Re: increasing default lintian verbosity?
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> One thing I see on debian-mentors a lot is a mismatch between the
> default configuration of lintian (used by most new people) and the
> configuration of people reviewing packages (much more verbose). This
> comes up a lot, resulting in people needing to explain the difference a
> lot and people cargo-culting lintian shell aliases and configuration
> files. I propose that the default configuration file be changed to
> something more verbose, perhaps something like what I use (see below).
I don't think this is a good idea. The reason why Lintian is conservative
about what it reports by default is because we know from past history that
people will not use it if they get too many tags that they think are
pointless or are annoying. While training new contributors on how to make
Debian packages is an important use case, for which info and possibly
pendantic is useful (experimental is not, and I don't believe anyone on
debian-mentors should ever expect people to enable experimental tags),
it's only one use case.
I care most about all of the regular Debian developers, who still do most
of the package uploads and maintain the critical packages, continuing to
use Lintian, so that Lintian can stay as effective as it is now at getting
people to make archive-wide changes. One of the places Lintian helps the
project the most is that it can do things like start warning about not
having build-arch and build-indep rules and have significant portions of
the archive just get fixed without having to do anything more
comprehensive or difficult. This only works if we can get nearly everyone
uploading packages to run Lintian all the time.
Maybe a better solution would be to improve the documentation for people
who are uploading packages for sponsorship to provide a suggested
.lintianrc for people who are new to packaging? (But even there, I'm
rather dubious that showing new packagers pedantic tags by default is a
good idea.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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