Bug#935706: lintian: Make tag certainty a programmatic assessment
Hi Axel,
[Thanks for the cc. I am on the list.]
On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 4:57 PM Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
You are right. A lot of thought went into those ratings. There is a
good likelihood we will revisit the issue. For example, we may
implement an automatic tag reliability ranking based on the proportion
of overrides in the archive.
> > My impression is that the classification system is more fine-grained
> > than the users of Lintian care about,
At the same time, I agree even more strongly with Russ's sentiment.
The system had too many levels. It was a burden to maintain. For each
new tag, we had to look up what the result would be (i.e. error,
warning, etc.). The new system is more direct.
As one of the active Lintian maintainers, I don't think the concept of
certainty is gone at all. First off, the fields are still around ( I
am not sure about pkg-perl-tools). We just weakened the effect on each
tag's everyday appearance—apparently based on a partial consensus, my
apologies.
In summary, I felt the concept of tag *certainty* fueled contentious
(and unfortunately unfounded) debates over tag appearance. I am glad
those days are gone.
Going forward, the *reliability* of Lintian's heuristics, on the other
hand, will become an important feature. It is an honest thing to do,
and required for an expert system like Lintian.
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
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