Bug#968416: lintian: Gives ridiculous warning about spelling in overrides file
Hi Robert,
On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 4:36 PM Robert Luberda <robert@debian.org> wrote:
>
> lintian started to show the following ridiculous warning about
> spelling in a line that is supposed to explain why lintian is
> wrong with its "typo in manual page" warning.
First off, you are seeing too many warnings. Most of the spelling tags
will be reduced to 'info' severities next week. Here is the full list:
tags/s/spelling-error-in-binary.desc:Severity: info
tags/s/spelling-error-in-changelog.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-copyright.desc:Severity: info
tags/s/spelling-error-in-description.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-description-synopsis.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-doc-base-abstract-field.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-doc-base-title-field.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-news-debian.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-patch-description.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-readme-debian.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-error-in-rules-requires-root.desc:Severity: warning
tags/s/spelling-in-override-comment.desc:Severity: warning
We'll try to address the line number too, although many of our line
references are approximate (as are those in the coding universe). I am
not sure why you spent so much time. Your override file is only three
lines long. [1]
More than likely, your confusion was caused by the fact that the
offending phrase also appeared in line 3, but that line is not an
override comment.
Aside from those observations, there is an underlying false positive.
We may ultimately turn off the multi-word part of spell check for
override comments, or perhaps require that spaces are used instead of
word breaks. We are in touch with our chief spell checker to find the
best solution for you.
Thanks to Paul Wise for these suggestions!
[1] https://sources.debian.org/src/super/3.30.1-1/debian/lintian-overrides/
> what's the point of checking spelling there?
Like most of our tags, this one is based on user suggestions. Being a
checking tool, Lintian tends to check more rather than less. It is
always better to ignore our tags instead of getting frustrated. We are
trying to make Lintian more accurate and helpful for everyone.
We also do not know how common an issue is when a tag is implemented.
In the future, we hope to derive a diagnostic power from comparing
false positives (as indicated by overrides) to the overall prevalence
in the archive. That will help us drop tags that are annoying rather
than helpful, for Debian contributors as a whole.
> And BTW. are you going
> to check spelling of comments in source code files as well? I'm pretty
> sure you can find a lot of spelling typos there...
I am sorry but we do not plan to implement your suggestion. You may be
correct that there are lots of typos in code comments but that task is
too complicated for us.
Patches are welcome.
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
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