Bug#848878: lintian: Does outdated-autotools-helper make sense when building with recent debhelper?

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2016 14:32:45 +0100 Christoph Biedl
<debian.axhn@manchmal.in-ulm.de> wrote:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.49
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> While improving the gnuift package (upload pending), I came across this
> lintian warning:
> 
> W: gnuift source: outdated-autotools-helper-file config.guess 2004-03-12
> (...)
> N:    For packages using debhelper, the tools from the dh-autoreconf package
> N:    should handle this issue. (...)
> 
> Now config.guess is indeed that old, however my packaging depends on
> debhelper 10 which depends on autotools-dev and dh-autoreconf package.
> So all packages required to deal with the situation are available at
> build time, and it seems the above warning is a false alarm.
> 
> Can you please review the check? My suggestion is to mute this warning
> if there's a build-dependency on debhelper (>= 10~). If however this
> still is an issue, the text needs a rewording since I have no idea how
> to proceed then.
> 
>     Christoph
> 
> 
> [...]

I am considering to just remove the check - all packages using the
debhelper sequence (regardless of compat) will by default run a tool to
update config.guess / config.sub.
  It would have false negatives for packages that do not use the
sequencer, but our current detection method is fairly ad-hoc and not in
anyway reliable.

Any concerns from other lintian maintainers, or should I "just do it"?

~Niels