Bug#865882: lintian: Why is debian-rules-parses-dpkg-parsechangelog a wishlist?

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Guillem Jover:
> On Sun, 2017-06-25 at 22:08:36 +0100, Chris Lamb wrote:
>> Guillem Jover wrote:
>>>>> Why is debian-rules-parses-dpkg-parsechangelog a wishlist?
>>>>
>>>> I'm a little confused by your question; are you asking why Lintian is
>>>> mentioning this in the first place? Or why it reports at with "wishlist"
>>>> severity? :)
>>>
>>> Yeah, I guess both. :)
>>
>> So, I suggested it because of the myriad ways people were parsing the
>> metadata from the debian/changelog, some of them buggy. Eg. they would
>> break on an epoch or a binNMU, etc. etc. Besides, if there is a nice
>> library, we might as well all standardise on using it?
> 
> Ah, I think it would be nice to explain something along these lines
> in the tag. I was rather confused by why the Makefile fragment was
> recommended over a simple already correct call.
> 
> I'm also aware of few people who have a problem with the fragment as
> an interface. So having lintian emit tags over those and stating that
> they should be switched to the fragment might annoy people.
> 
> [...]

Even with all the optimizations we have made in Debian (well, mostly
you), the "simple correct call" would still cause #793404 to a much
higher degree than the Makefile fragment that uses careful lazy
evaluation, wouldn't it?

Thanks,
~Niels