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

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

Hi Felix,

> > 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.
> 
> I think this is a case of miscommunication.
[…]
> Any references to certainty or its values, "wild-guess", "possible"
> and "certain", are gone. The table you quote is being removed.

Ah... very glad to hear we're on the same page here. I think I was
misled by the quoting of the table as it appeared to imply that
"certainty" or something similar would be retained, when that is not
what is being proposed here.

Regarding the name of this new combined field, we should never forget
that is not only graphical applications that have a "user interface" —
even command-line utilities have one, but it is merely encoded in
ASCII form. Interface design is a long-established field and has
various hard-won best practices and conventions, more easily noticed
in GUI programs with regard to visual design, but an oft-neglected and
extremely important component of a good interface concerns itself with
the terminology used. For example, words should not surprise or
confuse the user, and indeed should be as entirely seamless and
unnoticable as possible. "Don't make me think", the saying goes.
Another way of putting this is that if the user even consciously has
to consider the word, it is ipso facto not a good word.

I mention this because I believe "visibility" would not be serving our
users best. There are examples where a technically-correct name like
this, even if backed up by a well-meaning dictionary definition might
very well fit the idea better but we must have some empathy for the
casual and regular users of Lintian (a very old project, remember!)
who will be expecting the term "severity", even though that may not
100% fit the idea of this new tag (eg. not quite matching the BTS or
whatever). In other words, if any user of Lintian now thinks questions
like "where did severities go? what is visibility? how does it
differ?" then we are not doing our job to the best of our ability.

Anyway, unless I'm misunderstanding something again, I would very much
suggest we repurpose "severity" here instead of inventing a new term.


Regards,

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