Re: Lintian pickiness and packaging improvements

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:

>         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,

Fixed the cross-reference, which was simply wrong.

>  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.

[...]

>         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.

I think an argument could be made that it's a severity: minor bug from a
consistency perspective, but not normal.  I've therefore now downgraded it
to severity: minor, which I think more accurately represents how important
it is.  Since it's also certainty: possible, this downgrades it to an
info-level tag.

>         Things like that are why I take every lintian warning with a
>  huge grain of salt.

Any others?  :)

>         Ideally, Errors should correlate to important+ bugs, and must
>  violations, I think, warnings are bugs (minor and normal) and should
>  violations, and everything wishlist ought to be a informational
>  message. Style things belong in experimental. And, to give credit where
>  it is due, the majority of the tags are listed at their proper
>  severity. But by no means all of them are.

Style things belong in pedantic, unless they're fairly widely agreed-on,
in which case they belong as severity: minor.  In general, though, I agree
with the above.

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