Bug#710086: lintian: reports package-contains-ancient-file where this is not an error
Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.10.5
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
X-Debugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Dear Lintian maintainers,
I am currently working on the (re-)packaging of the "IRAF" astronomical
package [1]. This is a huge package with old roots -- the history goes
back to 1981.
Therefore, the package contains a number of files which are quite old --
some help files, source examples, documentation etc. date back to 1983.
This leads to the Lintian *error* shown in the subject. The Lintian
explanation even warns "Your package will be rejected by the Debian
archive scripts if it contains a file with such a timestamp".
The Debian Policy does not forbid to use old timestaps; in contrast it
encourages to keep them:
| 4.7 Time Stamps
| Maintainers should preserve the modification times of the upstream
| source files in a package, as far as is reasonably possible.
In the case of IRAF, it is reasonable to keep the timestamps since the
file age is an indicator to evaluate the contained information for the user.
The package is still heavily used in astronomy and definitely worth
packaging. It already was in Debian until 2004 but had to be removed due
to license restrictions (which are solved now).
Since this is a lintian error, I cannot just overwrite it. In a
discussion in debian-mentors [2], I was pointed to bug #218304 which
gives an explanation why this check is in Lintian. However, an earliest
allowed date of 1984 is far too strong for old packages, and I would ask
to set it (as the bug suggests) to something like 1971, to downgrade it
to a warning, or to remove it completely.
Best regards
Ole
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/690531
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2013/05/msg00298.html
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