Hello,
On Fri 13 Aug 2021 at 08:10AM -07, Felix Lechner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 12:57 AM Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> wrote:
>>
>> Is there some new external factor that make any unaddressed lintian
>> warnings problematic ?
>
> That may go beyond the scope of the present discussion, but yes:
> First, Lintian packaging hints are always viewed as imperfections;
> contributors strive to make their packages "Lintian-clean". Second, we
> now offer performance measures that will eventually help to improve or
> drop tags people find "noisy," i.e. those with a high rate of false
> positives. Here is an example for a tag that, being 95% accurate,
> works well. [1] The tag 'outdated-standards-version' operates
> completely outside of that paradigm. It always is, and forever will
> be, noisy.
>
> I see myself as an advocate for the folks who like Lintian but are
> annoyed by it. More often than not, they are right.
I would like to encourage you to broaden your conception of how Lintian
can be useful to contributors. Here is another perspective, which I'm
confident is not held only by myself. I do not strive for my packages
to be Lintian-clean, and I don't add overrides unless I think that those
overrides would serve as useful pieces of source package documentation.
Nevertheless, I find Lintian's output extremely useful for finding
problems. As an example, one of those problems it helpfully points out
to me is that the package's S-V has not been updated since the last
stable release, as that's what outdated-standards-version means. I
agree with the text in Policy which says
It is recommended that each package be reviewed at least once per
Debian release, so a Standards-Version older than the previous
Debian release is indicative of work (if only review work) that
needs doing.
and for most packages I *don't* want to review it more often than that.
So the tag is extremely useful to prompting me to look at something that
I have trained myself not to worry too much about the rest of the time.
--
Sean Whitton
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