Bug#935706: lintian: Make tag certainty a programmatic assessment

["Chris Lamb" <lamby@debian.org>]

Hi,

> lintian: Make tag certainty a programmatic assessment

Controversial opinion — the "certainty" of tags is of no actionable
benefit to either the users of Lintian or its developers and should
be removed.

If a tag is emitted by Lintian, this leads to one of four actions:

 a) fixing the problem
 b) postponing the fixing of the issue
 c) adding an override the issue 
 d) filing a false-positive bug report against lintian

Knowing the "certainty" is no meaningful benefit to working out what
to do from the above. Making the certainty programmatic is just
papering over this fundamental problem and implementation of this
feature could distract us from other, likely more valuable, tasks.

Even if there was some benefit or tortured situation where this might
affect what to do, the "certainty" is highly subjective and only appears
to result in annoying our users when there is a legitimate false-
positive and lintian is patronisingly and obstinately telling them it
is "certain". 


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-