Bug#898136: lintian: Reduce depends-on-mail-transport-agent-without-alternatives to pedantic
Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> writes:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.85
> Severity: normal
> Also, please reduce the certainty from certain. It's not.
> I'd just noticed depends-on-mail-transport-agent-without-alternatives.
> I mainain approximately 10% of the packages affected by the check (3 of
> 33) and in all those cases the check is wrong. A cursory review of some
> of the others clearly show it's incorrect for them as well (at least
> 10). I don't think a check with a false positive rate of a minimum of
> nearly 50% is that useful.
> In the case of my three, they depend on postfix without alternative
> becuase they are only for postfix.
It sounds like there's both a bug and a certainty error here, but I don't
think this check is a good example of something that should be pedantic.
The dependency structure for depending on a generic MTA should be
documented in Policy and only isn't because no one has found the time to
write the patch.
A simple check for whether the depended-on MTA is also present in the name
of the package would make a lot of these false positives go away. If the
package name contains "postfix" or "exim4" and depends on those MTAs, it's
probably not a mistake. :)
More generally, I suspect this tag should only affect packages that depend
on the default (exim4). If the package is already depending on a
non-default MTA, I think it's highly likely that was intentional and
Lintian is being more annoying than helpful here.
Pedantic isn't a dumping ground for buggy or uncertain checks. If a check
is known to be buggy or produce a lot of false positives but we don't want
to delete it entirely because we think we can make it better in the
future, that's what experimental is for. Pedantic is for best-practice
advice that's controversial, that is correct but may not be fixable (no
upstream changelog, for instance), or that is minor
quality-of-implementation details that a lot of maintainers aren't
interested in messing with (upstream/metadata, for instance).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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