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

[Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com>]

Hi Chris,

On Sun, Mar 8, 2020 at 2:06 PM Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> wrote:
>
> As I understand it, you are proposing two interrelated changes here:

I can see why you might think that, but it is not how I would phrase it.

>   a) Renaming the existing concept of severity (eg. error/warning/
>      pedantic, etc.) to "visibility".

The field for severity does not hold those values. The alert levels
are calculated from this table:

# Map severity/certainty levels to tag codes.
our %CODES = (
    classification => { 'wild-guess' => 'C', possible => 'C', certain => 'C' },
    pedantic  => { 'wild-guess' => 'P', possible => 'P', certain => 'P' },
    wishlist  => { 'wild-guess' => 'I', possible => 'I', certain => 'I' },
    minor     => { 'wild-guess' => 'I', possible => 'I', certain => 'W' },
    normal    => { 'wild-guess' => 'I', possible => 'W', certain => 'W' },
    important => { 'wild-guess' => 'W', possible => 'E', certain => 'E' },
    serious   => { 'wild-guess' => 'E', possible => 'E', certain => 'E' },
);

(from https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/lib/Lintian/Tag/Info.pm#L49-57)

I am suggesting to replace the fields for Severity and Certainty with
the values from that table (in word form). The proposed name for the
new field is Visibility, which is neutral and descriptive. (It also
offers no overtone of value; in fact, the visibility will become
completely customizable.)

>   b) Dropping the certainty concept entirely (eg. wild guess, possible
>      etc.)

Yes, the certainty will be dropped entirely, except I would like to
retain values other than 'certain' for a while to examine the accuracy
of the respective tags. Some thought (or criticism) went into those
values.

> Have I understood you correctly here?

Yes, with this clarification I am confident we are talking about the same thing.

Kind regards
Felix Lechner