Bug#909319: Show unnecessary overrides
On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 01:18:08PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:
>
> > Would there be any objection to upgrading it to a warning (not an error,
> > just a warning)?
>
> I vaguely recall us considering doing that, but the concern was that
> overrides are a mechanism to keep people using Lintian who are pretty
> sensitive to unnecessary tags. So giving people a way to just make the
> tag go away and not bother them about it felt a touch inconsistent with
> making the unused-override tag a warning, particularly since there were
> (are?) a few Lintian tags that can come and go with different versions of
> the package or builds on different architectures.
>
> Lintian in general uses warning as the level of "we really think every
> packager should know about this stuff even if you don't really like
> linters or Lintian in particular," and info as the level of "okay, you
> actually care about Lintian, so we're going to show you all the things we
> think are reasonably fixable."
While I do think unused-override makes sense as a warning, here's an
alternative that would have worked for the issue I ran into:
Could Lintian's summary line mention unused overrides?
The line that says:
N: 1 tag overridden (1 error)
could say:
N: 1 tag overridden (1 error); 1 unnecessary override
That would have called attention to the issue, without necessarily
emitting an actual warning.
Does that seem reasonable?
Reply to: