Bug#1019980: lintian: source-is-missing check for HTML is much too sensitive
On Sun, Sep 18, 2022 at 08:11:03AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> I think the right thing for putty here is for upstream to remove the
> HTML from their VCS and tarballs, then add the generation process to
> their build system and continuous integration, so that they always know
> when there are problems with generating the HTML.
The HTML files have never been in PuTTY upstream's VCS. They are
generated automatically as part of PuTTY's build system for release
tarballs, as a convenience to people who want to build PuTTY without
Halibut, since it's a somewhat niche documentation tool. Since I agree
with upstream that this is a reasonable convenience, I'm not going to
ask them to stop doing it.
> If they refuse then you could exclude the HTML from Debian's copy of
> the upstream tarball.
We're not talking about opaque object code here. This is perfectly
readable plain HTML that just happens to be generated from another
perfectly readable text format. It's not the preferred form of
modification, sure (I wouldn't edit it directly since I have the Halibut
input files available, but if nobody told me that those existed then I'd
happily edit the HTML without even noticing), but this package isn't
covered by the GPL so that's not very relevant.
I'm not going to waste a second on editing Debian's copy of the upstream
tarball for this complete non-issue. I already take care to ensure that
the package rebuilds the documentation from source, and there's no DFSG
issue with the pre-generated files being present so there's no reason to
remove them from the tarball. The only reason that the presence of
pre-generated files is even coming up is because Lintian's heuristics
are misfiring in a way that seems clearly incorrect and probably
unintentional.
> Until either lintian changes or the putty HTML gets removed, overriding
> the lintian warning in putty seems the correct thing to do.
Done.
> If that is done, I think lintian should add more heuristics to detect
> other generated HTML. The halibut generated HTML doesn't make that easy
> but there are some signals that can be added I think, like this:
>
> halibut-1.3/bk_html.c: html_raw(&ho, "<!-- version IDs:\n");
Firstly, that's conditional and not present in the generated PuTTY
documentation. (I've sent a patch upstream to add a suitable <meta
name="generator"> tag, since that seems like a reasonable thing to
include in any event.)
Secondly, with respect, this is a distraction from the point of this
bug. Feel free to file a separate bug for more detailed heuristics, but
Lintian should start by making its current heuristics not entirely wrong
(the presence of a .fragment.js file obviously has nothing to do with
whether general HTML files are generated, only ones that have certain
kinds of <script> tags). That's what I'm requesting here.
Thanks,
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
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