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

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

Felix Lechner wrote:

> 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' },
>
> 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.

I would disagree that this has no overtone of value as it appears to
simply encode the currently unhelpful distinction between "wild-guess",
"possible" and "certain" in a new and relatively unfamiliar way with
a slightly ambiguous name.

As it still has a concept of how confident the Lintian maintainers
are, it will still be subject to the same "criticism" (as you call it)
and thus continue the unproductive and demotivating levels of
antagonism in otherwise legitimate bug reports that I am increasingly
seeing. My point all along is not that the concept of "certainty" has
zero value, but rather that it has a negative one. ie. it is a cost
and we should remove it.

As a minor point, I additionally would see no benefit in it being
customisable between/for teams and believe this would just be cause
for confusion when we attempt to reproduce & fix problems for our
users.

Let us focus on making Lintian simpler & fun to maintain and
use instead.


Regards,

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