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

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

Hi Axel,

> 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.

I don't see how the removal of Certainty requires checks to be
100% perfect. There is no change of thought here, just the removal of
metadata that was highly dubious to begin with. :)

If a check is wildly inaccurate we still have many options available
to us, including improving it (patches always welcome!), removing it,
moving it to the "experimental" pile, or even adding an explicit
remark to the tag's description, and so on. Indeed, this last idea
will be much more useful than some implied subtle distinction between
certainty levels.

In practice, each particular new "certainty" value was not well-
calibrated when added and essentially never adjusted … except in cases
where the Lintian maintainers received bug reports that had an
antagonistic quality to them fueled by an overly-optimistic appraisal
of a check's reliability. Flames wrapped in the plausibly-deniable
wrapper of a legitimate bug report aren't any more fun to receive than
regular flames tbh.

In other words, removal of the field simply reflects the reality and
status quo that this field was misleading at best and inflammatory at
worst.


Best wishes,

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