Bug#935706: lintian: Make tag certainty a programmatic assessment
Hi,
to my dismay I discovered that Lintian's Certainty feature has been
removed.
Chris Lamb wrote:
> Controversial opinion
Indeed controversial.
> the "certainty" of tags is of no actionable benefit to either the
> users of Lintian or its developers and should be removed.
JFTR: I strongly disagree. The Certainty was a very helpful decision
helper for Lintian users who had a gut feeling about a lintian-emitted
tag being a false positive by seeing how reliable the author of the
tag suspected it's, well, Certainty — especially for heuristic checks.
With removing the Certainty you basically removed the possibility to
write Lintian checks which are known to not be or in some cases even
never can be 100% perfect.
One such check is for example library-package-name-for-application and
application-not-library which had the Certainty: wildguess as there's
no chance to be really precise. (Which probably is also the reason why
there are still tons of true positives out there, mostly python
packages.
> a) fixing the problem
> c) adding an override the issue
The Certainty field was a good help to decide between these two..
> 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".
I disagree here, too. If it's a fixable false-positive, especially for
"Certainty: certain", then it should be fixed. If it's not fixable,
the Certainty should be downgraded.
Russ Allbery wrote:
> The problem, though, was that in some cases the bug would be a serious
> Policy violation *if Lintian were right*, but Lintian was often wrong.
> Certainty was an attempt to somehow capture that so that Lintian could
> express to the maintainer "this is a serious problem with your package if
> what I found is true, but there's a good chance this is a false positive."
This.
> From my perspective, the certainty concept is more useful for the
> wild-guess end of the spectrum, where it's conveying useful
> information ("this would be a serious problem, but we're bad at
> reliably detecting it").
This.
> In practice, I don't think this has happened.
It happened. These fields were used.
> My impression is that the classification system is more fine-grained
> than the users of Lintian care about,
Definitely not.
Regards, Axel
--
,''`. | Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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