Bug#1115177: lintian: warns about latest host (dev) tools API available in stable
On Tue, 16 Sep 2025, Nilesh Patra wrote:
>>> But why should it be omitted? I think moving it to info should be good
>>> enough to do here -- we would like to encourage maintainers to move to
>>> a newer watch version eventually.
>>
>> It’s likely fatal if they upgrade prematurely, though.
>
>I don't understand this part. Can you be verbose about how this
>appears fatal to you?
>
>Lintian version released to unstable is not meant for trixie and are
Yes, but the watch file especially is expected to be consumable
by developers and other tooling on trixie. Heck, probably even
bookworm at least. There’s a service for this even, what does the
backend behind qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/watch use?
>> (And, perhaps I was a bit angry, but recent lintian churn has
>> been immense every time it got updated… this is getting on the
>> nerves of all package maintainers…)
>
>I'd like to hear reasons of what led you to say this, and what specific
>pain points you have had since past few (with past one year) lintian releases.
It’s been a buildup. Lots of tag renamings (some tags got renamed
twice even), the whole move to the new format with the square
brackets (which made the lintian from the previous stable even
segfaulting), and then a whole flood of rather opinionated new
tags that even partially are wrong (e.g. the one that complains
about debian/* not having the current year listed in copyright
even when there was nothing passing threshold of originality in
the current year).
I’m sorry I don’t have a small number of actionable points for this.
Thanks anyway,
//mirabilos
--
Sometimes they [people] care too much: pretty printers [and syntax highligh-
ting, d.A.] mechanically produce pretty output that accentuates irrelevant
detail in the program, which is as sensible as putting all the prepositions
in English text in bold font. -- Rob Pike in "Notes on Programming in C"
Reply to: