Bug#962158: lintian: New very problematic --fail-on default value
Hi Chris,
On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 11:15 PM Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Felix, can you help out? I am not in a position to contribute to this
> discussion itself.
Well, I wish I could. Guillem makes many alarmist statements, but
fails to explain why the change is an undue burden. I also do not know
how to engage productively with visceral and absolute responses such
as:
> Err…
> it does not make any sense whatsoever
> does not match reality
> it does not even make sense within a Debian-centric view
> I'll have to very much disagree
> you have still not explained what this default change really accomplishes
> besides inducing tons of work and breakage
> No, they did not.
It's amazing how much time and energy Guillem expended on this issue
here, on IRC, and in #962157 while dpkg has more open bugs than
Lintian.
As you know from my past behavior with 'md5sums -z' or the odd
contributor on Salsa, I am not opposed to compromise when it brings
peace. In the present case, such a compromise could be a value 'none'
to disable the default Guillem likes (and which I would like to
remove).
At the same time, the change was widely released two weeks ago. Simon
Quigley from Ubuntu announced it on debian-devel on May 25 [1], while
I advertised the change repeatedly on IRC and added a note to DevNews.
Some users may have already adapted their systems.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/05/msg00239.html
Now the best course of action, I think, is to downgrade the severity
again to Guillem's original setting of 'important'. That will allow
the change to remain in testing. It is, after all, what the testing
distribution is for.
It would also give me more time to understand the possibly
unreasonable burden on Lintian users across Debian and the derivative
ecosystem. Simon may receive feedback from Ubuntu, a significant
derivative. If there are real problems, I am happy to discuss a
solution that reverts the default to Lintian's old setting.
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
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