Bug#935706: lintian: Make tag certainty a programmatic assessment
Hi Chris,
On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 6:00 PM Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Controversial opinion — the "certainty" of tags is of no actionable
> benefit to either the users of Lintian or its developers and should
> be removed.
Actually, I agree one hundred percent. I will introduce a new
field---probably called Relevance, Urgency, Significance, Importance,
Import, or simply Weight---to gradually replace the current mechanism.
Please feel free to weigh in on the name.
> 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.
Perhaps the certainty was introduced to deflect occasional but heated
conversations about the diagnostic level. Furthering the same goal, I
would like to propose another way to disentangle lab work from
diagnosis.
In my mind, Lintian's checks should primarily issue classification
tags that state mundane facts. A later step would then issue a
diagnosis based on the facts. That way, the initial scan is not
subject any conversations other than method of detection.
That line of thinking emerged when accommodating new tags for Debian
Janitor. It is perhaps best illustrated by my commit:
https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/f4b977beb3ef777e5d1726512d077022ad348a8a
Those tags simply list the fields present in debian/upstream/metadata.
Based on discussions on IRC, such a basic tag made sense to Jelmer and
offered greater utility in the long term. Sorry about the lack of
communication. I noticed you added this commit later:
https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/00c29cf4b43c21edf1055cf9e06386e02e12e460
Did Jelmer ask for it?
Debian Janitor would be a primary consumer of the simple lab work.
Separating that from the actual diagnostics would permanently shift
conversations about what should trigger a user alert to a higher
level.
User alerts could in fact be completely personalized, similar to the
way profiles work today. People could trade profiles by email. We
could even distribute snippets to some groups, such as Perl
developers, who wish to receive higher alert levels for certain topics.
One way to think about it, is that Lintian's lab work would be similar
to a tokenizer like flex, and lintian's diagnostics would be more like
bison. The exchange format would be JSON, so that it can be uploaded
to UDD for everyone's benefit and potentially other tools, as well.
> 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".
Thank you for bringing that up. It is perhaps the greatest point of all!
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
Reply to: