Re: Lintian pickiness and packaging improvements
On Wed, Oct 21 2009, Ben Finney wrote:
> Jan Hauke Rahm <jhr@debian.org> writes:
>> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 04:12:21AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> > There is a time and a place where these lintian options are
>> > useful. They certainly have a place, and are recommended for
>> > experienced developers, and critical for helping to improve
>> > lintian. But one needs to know when to use them, and when not to
>> > bother.
> I think this approach is right for Lintian's experimental checks. They
> should be enabled only by those who want to improve Lintian by finding
> faults in the checks.
>
> I don't think it's right for the pedantic checks that are *not*
> experimental. If those are never used except by people who want to
> improve Lintian, then there seems to be little point.
It is not I who made the comments about the quality of pedantic
checks: Lintian authors have said:
Pedantic tags are Lintian at its most pickiest and include
checks for particular Debian packaging styles, checks that are
very frequently wrong, and checks that many people disagree
with. Expect false positives and Lintian tags that you don't
consider useful if you use this option. Adding overrides for
pedantic tags is probably not worth the effort.
Th other point is: this is a forum for people new to Debian
packaging. There such things as advanced topics; things not to do until
you have some experience and can distinguish between things that are
lacunae and things that are stylistic differences.With experience, one
may tell the difference between false positives, and checks which are,
in your opinion, just wrong and can be discarded.
> So applying this attitude to the Lintian pedantic checks seems to be
> an argument for not having them in Lintian at all.
Err, no. Experienced developers might gain some benefit from
this class of reports. They are in a separate class for a reason. I do
not think inexperienced people need look at these, there is already
information overload for novices, let them first gain the experience,
and then go back an look at the pedantic tags and see which ones they
need to change.
manoj
--
"Well I don't see why I have to make one man miserable when I can make
so many men happy." -- Ellyn Mustard, about marriage
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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