Package: lintian Version: 2.5.28~bpo70+1 Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-CC: Debian mentors <debian-mentors@lists.debian.org> Hi Lintian maintainers, The following wish list bug results from a brief discussion (see the final message with more information below) on the d-mentors e-mail-list. It is noted that people use lintian overrides to hide investigated issues that don't have a short term solution. Paul Wise mentioned this is not where overrides are for. So, Paul and I suggest the following: - Add a way to document information about lintian messages, related to the current package, such that it is clear that the message has been investigated but can/will not be solved (in the short term). - Add an argument to lintian to not show messages that have such a comment to allow a maintainer to focus on unresolved/uninvestigated/new messages instead of either abusing overrides or having to remember everything. Thanks for considering and the great tool that lintian is. Paul -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: lintian overrides [Was: Bug#763540: Review of psocksxx/0.0.5-1] Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2014 09:12:25 +0800 From: Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> To: Debian mentors <debian-mentors@lists.debian.org> On Sat, Oct 4, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Paul Gevers wrote: > I have seen this before and I (as a maintainer) don't understand this > comment so bold as it is put here. I would say that overrides can help > you to see which items you (or your sponsee¹ in case of sponsorship) > already investigated. The point of lintian overrides is to hide issues shown by default that are the fault of lintian where lintian cannot be fixed. Anything else is not the way overrides were meant to be used. > In the case of pedantic and info, you could even say that an override > is allowed when the item might be still valid but for whatever reason > is not going to be fixed (soon). Valid suggestions by lintian shouldn't be hidden. pedantic, experimental and info are hidden by default so there is no need to hide them even if they are the fault of lintian and can't be fixed in lintian, much of the time they are valid issues though. > lintian on nearly every build I do and it help me to keep track of the > issue I think I still need to resolve. As long as each override has an > extensive and valid explanation, I don't see anything wrong with that > and I prefer it over having to scroll through items that are ignored > anyways. That is an interesting use-case but I think just comments in README.source or elsewhere is the way to go rather than overrides. I think it would be interesting to be able to add comments associated with lintian tags but not override them, so it would produce something like the below (with pedantic turned on). That would cover your use-case without misusing overrides. C: No time to write manual pages, help welcome W: codespell: binary-without-manpage usr/bin/codespell C: Need to ask upstream about this P: codespell: no-upstream-changelog Could you file a bug asking for this feature? Perhaps something like this in debian/package.lintian-comments could be the way to go? # No time to write manual pages, help welcome codespell: binary-without-manpage usr/bin/codespell # Need to ask upstream about this codespell: no-upstream-changelog > As a sponsor, I always check all the overrides and only accept those I > understand. Documenting the reason goes a long way for that (as well as > it helps in the future to remember the original reasoning). Documentation is definitely useful, especially during sponsorship, but it doesn't need overrides.
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