Bug#968416: lintian: Gives ridiculous warning about spelling in overrides file

[IOhannes m zmölnig (Debian GNU|Linux) <umlaeute@debian.org>]

On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 19:27:46 -0700 Felix Lechner 
<felix.lechner@lease-up.com> wrote:
> > 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.

i think this was a tongue-in-cheek comment:
lintian doesn't do spell-checking in comments, and i think that's fine.
i (guess i) agree with robert, that lintian shouldn't do spell-checking 
in comments of lintian-override files either.


>
> > what's the point of checking spelling there?
>
> Like most of our tags, this one is based on user suggestions.

could you please point to the relevant bug-report?
i think it is great that lintian does spell-checking.
inevitably it will find false-positives (that's to be expected).
in this case, i think the sensible thing for maintainers is to override 
the false-positive it's good practice to document the context why this 
is not a spelling error in the first place.
in many cases, this will re-produce the false-positive in the comment.
which makes it all a bit tautological.
(if i override the "spelling-in-override-comment" tag, will it trigger 
another warning?)


i therefore propose to ignore spelling errors in lintian-override files 
if they appear in comments directly before any "spelling-in-*" tag in 
the overrides file.

fgmndasr
IOhannes