Re: "Lintian ratcheting" approach
Hi,
Thanks for your comment, Niels.
On Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:30:04 +0100
Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> wrote:
> However, I fear this idea will make people more frustrated with
> Lintian and simply attempt to bypass the "ratchet" (or throw us a fit).
> Not too long ago, the FTP-masters fixed a bug in their auto-reject
> code and people were not pleased that their package was suddenly
> rejected for "no apparent reason"[1]. So for me, that rules out the
> server side option.
>
> I have a feeling that the client-side approach will have a similar
> effect for these maintainers (assuming opt-out semantics).
I understand you fear this may make people more frustrated then ignore
lintian itself.
But, wait - Why they may ignore Lintian?
Because they don't believe it is necessary task for them, IMO.
So, not "It's a new rule, obey this" approach but explaining
"Why we should do that" for Consensus building is important to
apply this.
- It's a one of the challenge to improve our package quality
- Increasing lintian errors and warnings is "Bad Smell".
This feature probably prevents your package to be worse than previous (we hope)
You can find such "sign" with using this experimental feature.
- However, sometimes it would hit false-positive result since lintian
is not perfect (you know). So if you find something wrong with it,
please report it to BTS.
- We don't enable this feature by default at first, but plan to switch
enable in the future (so report false-positive is important).
etc.
> But with
> using opt-in semantics, there is no actual point in the ratchet[2].
> On a related topic, consider reading Russ Allbery's mail at [3].
In the end, it should be opt-out ratcheting but start it with opt-in
is better (lintian opt-out is another issue).
> So, for me, a prerequisite to doing the ratchet is that Lintian is not
> (going to be) preceived as a "pain". Not only in correctness of results
> (accuracy), but also in speed.
Well, ratcheting approach is just compare previous result (that is in
lintian.d.o) and current output. It doesn't make the situation worse.
--
Regards,
Hideki Yamane henrich @ debian.or.jp/org
http://wiki.debian.org/HidekiYamane
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