Re: Lintian pickiness and packaging improvements
Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22 2009, Raphael Geissert wrote:
>
>> Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>>
>>> I also think that style issues should not be a part of even
>>> Pedantic checks. If a package is using a different, and arguably
>>> better style, then lintian should keep its nose out.
>>
>> If there's a better style I guess nobody would object to consider
>> recommend it or
>
> You are not getting it. Better is subjective. You can have a
> dozen "better" styles, all contradictory. Are you planning on having
> checks that can never all be met simultaneously? That is what you get
> when you go for subjectively "better" styles.
Yeah, I noticed that my argument was poor some minutes after posting the
message, but forgot to correct it.
The whole idea is to standardise, and preferably reduce to only
two "standard" styles if possible.
>
>> at least make sure lintian doesn't complain about it.
>
> Ah. I have a few of those. For example, take this warning from
> Lintian: description-synopsis-might-not-be-phrased-properly
>
> This is not policy, but dev-ref, and when it was proposed, it
> was argued that if we had a non clause, the front ends can make it look
> "nicer", by completing the sentence, adding the period, etc, (perhaps
> by showing "Package" is a <short description> . That was around 6
> years or so ago.
This should probably be brought up on -devel and the new concensus applied
and by lintian.
[...]
>
> And why is this a warning as opposed to an
> informational message? How is the package impacted by having a gosh
> darned period in the short description? This is the same level of
> impairment as the other non info warnings? seriously? Thisis not a
> severity normal bug. It is not even a severity wishlist bug. It is a
> style issue.
Agreed, the severity is over inflated.
>
> Things like that are why I take every lintian warning with a
> huge grain of salt.
Would be great if you could help out by pointing those out. Even a short
message on IRC with a short reasonable, initial, argument is enough.
Please remember that lintian has many many checks (counting 832 different
tags here), and that verifying each and every of them requires a lot of
time and effort so any help is welcome (and by that I don't mean you should
do anything else other than running lintian as usual and point out possible
issues).
> Lintian is a great tool. But it has long standing flaws, and
> previous maintainers of lintian have been resistant to changing that.
>
Feedback is very welcomed.
P.S. Last post about this in -mentors, as Charles suggested/requested.
Cheers,
--
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net
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