Lintian experimental tags (was: RFS: ampache (updated package))

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Raphael Geissert <geissert@debian.org> writes:

> Well, experimental checks are not to be considered "irrelevant chatter",
> hence my question.

> The current experimental checks are:
> Tag: spelling-error-in-binary
> Severity: normal
> Certainty: wild-guess

> It is based on the output of strings(1) so it can't tell for sure whether a
> string is actually displayed or it is just a symbol or something else, or
> whether it is really an error or not (although it is pretty accurate in
> most cases).

I've removed the experimental tag on this for the next release of Lintian.
I think it's reasonably mature, and the certainty is wild-guess, which is
about right.  I changed the severity to minor, since by definition in our
BTS spelling errors are minor bugs.  minor/wild-guess will make this an
info-level tag.

> Tag: template-uses-unsplit-choices
> Severity: normal
> Certainty: possible

> Erm, IIRC this one should no longer be marked as experimental ever since
> lenny was released.

Will no longer be experimental in the next upload.

> Tag: embedded-pear-module
> Severity: normal
> Certainty: possible

> PEAR modules are a bit tricky to detect properly without making it too
> specific, in which case the check itself wouldn't be of much use.

Left experimental for the time being.

> Tag: shlib-calls-exit
> Severity: wishlist
> Certainty: possible

> There's no way for lintian to tell whether the usage of exit or _exit is
> correct at all in the shared library, and it is based only by looking at
> the symbols.

I'm considering removing this one entirely.  It has very serious false
positive problems due to generic helper libraries that could call exit but
never use that code path in the library code.  We have this because it's
something that rpmlint checks, but most of the cases of it that I've seen
are actually wrong or at least not interesting.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>