On 2015-08-30 21:49, Axel Beckert wrote: > Hi, > > [...] > > But where to make the cut? Just because a regexp uses "(?!…)"? Surely > not! Or because it is too long? Doesn't sound like a valid reason > either. > Personally, I would like to see fewer regexs myself. Not because we use weird constructs, but because we are rather poor at determining the performance characteristics of them. We have had at least 3-4 issues with regexes in the past year (and a half?) that would completely undermine lintian. Either by making lintian slow or the reason "backtrack limit exceeded". > I'd rather make it even longer using the /x flag and then being able > to add comments. > > But that will again break with the one-line-per-entry design of that > file. > You would not be the first. :) We would need another data file format, like a deb822 or YAML, or whatever. I did a prototype branch for deb822 at [1]. My major issue is that line-numbers are all wrong, which makes error reporting "fun". > Anyway: I think we should _generally_ improve the situation and not > duplicating functionality for a single tag. > > Regards, Axel > Flip-side: There is no much gain in it for us to have 20 distinct "foo-installs-bar" tags when 1 could do. It is certainly a trade-off because we should not make tags "too overloaded" either. That also harms us and lintian users. Thanks, ~Niels [1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/nthykier/lintian.git/log/?h=deb822-data-files
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