Bug#964073: lintian: Possible false positives for breakout-link for Lua modules
Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 8:16 PM Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>> I'm puzzled by why you would have changed Lintian in response to that
>> bug, given that the reported problem was only with Lintian and was
>> fixed sixteen years ago.
> I am just working through open bugs.
I didn't reply to an earlier discussion where you said something similar
because you're doing a ton of excellent work on Lintian and making a lot
of forward progress. I'm not active and don't want to second-guess how
you're handling things. But I guess I'll say here that I think the point
of a linter is externalized good taste. It's a codification of good
judgment calls about the way to construct a package. That means judgment
calls about whether a given suggestion is good taste or important always
felt to me like a significant part of the work.
> Why did you not voice your opposition as a maintainer during the past
> seventeen years, or close the bug?
I should have, and probably the answer is that I didn't read it in any
detail. Lintian always had between 200 and 400 bugs when I was working on
it, and my work style was generally to pick a bug and work on it until I
could close it, rather than going through all of the bugs. I also
prioritized newer bugs over older bugs.
That said, I think the way I would have interpreted that bug would have
been to warn about symlinks inside /usr/lib to outside of /usr/lib. On
first glance, I might have thought that might be reasonable, although
looking at it now, I'm not sure what problem that would cause and
therefore what purpose would be served by warning about it.
In general, I wouldn't assume that all the old bugs are valid or
interesting. I don't think I ever did a great job of triage, particularly
on older stuff.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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