Bug#683596: lintian: False positive "unused-override" when checking multiple packages with lintian
On 2012-08-02 10:13, Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.10
> Severity: normal
>
> Hi folks,
>
Hi,
> I just stumbled upon lintian giving me a false "unused-override"
> tag. This happens when you override some tag because the file
> needed for it is in another package, but then run lintian on both
> packages involved: Lintian now finds the file in the other package,
> doesn't trigger the warning and thinks the override is unused.
>
I have to admit I have been a bit conflicted in case. On one hand, I
would like to promote the use of group processing precisely because it
can give more accurate results.
On the other hand, Lintian is now being used in "pre-install" checks
(e.g. apt-daemon) where I am almost the checker will not fetch the
related packages. Obviously these pre-install checkers will (depending
on the tags emitted) refuse the install the package.
> In this particular case, I was overriding the menu-icon-missing tag
> in the openttd package, since the menu icon is in the openttd-data
> package (which openttd depens on).
>
> To reproduce (I removed an unrelated binary-without-manpage tag from
> below output for clarity):
>
> [...]
(JFTR, you can use "--tags <the-only-tag-you-want-to-see>", so you don't
have to fix the output manually. In theory it is also faster as Lintian
is lazy)
>
> I don't think there's any way right now I can build my package such that
> it is lintian clean both when checking with just openttd and when
> checking openttd and openttd-data in the same lintian run (e.g., when
> running lintian on the .changes file).
>
Technically I believe you can override "unused-override", but lets not
go there.
> I'm not sure what the proper fix for this is. Perhaps each check should
> detect that it's _not_ firing because there are multiple packages (and
> it would have fired if the packages were processed separately), or
> perhaps for each apparently unused override, the given check should be run
> on each package separately to see if it's really unused?
>
If it is to be any of those two, I'd go for the former. Probably, the
former is the only solution to this problem if we want to make packages
Lintian clean in both use-cases.
> Gr.
>
> Matthijs
>
> [...]
~Niels
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