Re: increasing default lintian verbosity?
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Sat, 2012-01-21 at 22:02 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> 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.)
> maint-guide suggests to use -i -I:
> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/checkit.en.html#lintians
Yeah, but that's in the middle of a rather long document. Given how
integral Lintian is to the mentoring process, I wonder if it would be good
to push it at people more directly on the pages they have to read to learn
how to upload. For example, put it directly on:
http://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers
like the dput instructions. I think it's warranted since it seems to be
the first thing that just about everyone doing regular mentoring checks.
> I think there are definitely useful X and P tags, which is why I enable
> them. Especially things like no-upstream-changelog or
> source-contains-prebuilt-windows-binary are useful to forward upstream
Oh, there's definitely useful tags, to be sure. If they weren't useful,
we'd hopefully remove them completely. :) It's more that, in my
mentoring of people building Debian packages here at Stanford (we have an
internal requirement that all software we deploy be packaged as Debian
packages, so I make a lot of people learn how to package), the number of
tags that Lintian spits out at the start is something they find very
intimidating. I like to ease them in, start them on the high-priority
stuff and then encourage them to get pickier and pickier later on.
I think it takes a while to understand and internalize the reasons for the
rules before one can be an effective communicator with upstream. Giving
new packagers tags that only upstream can resolve and encouraging them to
talk to upstream can result in new packagers passing along confused or
ham-handed statements to upstream, which can then cause upstream to get
understandably annoyed with what are presented to them as weird Debian
requirements.
I'm not saying that you're wrong to use pedantic tags when mentoring, only
that it feels like a sharpish stick, and I'm not entirely sure the benefit
would be greater than the cost of encouraging all package maintainers who
want to be mentored to use them blindly. (Using them in conjunction with
a mentor who is explaining them and can help with drafting upstream
communication is another matter, of course.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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