Package: lintian Version: 2.5.52 Severity: wishlist Dear maintainers, At the Debian Policy BoF at DebConf17, it was suggested that Lintian start tracking metadata that connects up Lintian tags and releases of Debian Policy. Looking at my notes from the BoF, there are two types of metadata that could be useful: 1. tag metadata indicating the release of policy that added the requirement or recommendation checked by the tag For example, a Lintian tag emitted when a package installs both a menu entry and a desktop entry would have '4.0.1' for the value of this piece of metadata. That's because policy 4.0.1 introduced the requirement that a package not install both a menu entry and a desktop entry. 2. for each Lintian release, a list of policy versions such that for each version V, if the Standards-Version of a package is the version of policy immediately prior to V and the package is Lintian clean, the Standards-Version may be bumped to V It should be clear how (2) is useful to package maintainers: if their package has Standards-Version 4.0.0, the package is Lintian clean under the latest release of Lintian and the list of versions in (2) for the latest release of Lintian includes 4.0.1, they may bump their Standards-Version to 4.0.1 without working through the upgrading checklist. (1) is useful for constructing (2): we can compare the list of tags which have 4.0.1 as their value for (1) to the upgrading checklist for policy release 4.0.1, and if each item in the list is covered by a tag, we may add 4.0.1 to (2) for the next release of Lintian. We would expect this metadata to be quite incomplete, both because it is time-consuming to compile and because not all new policy requirements can be checked by Lintian tags. This incompleteness would not prevent the metadata from being useful to maintainers where it does exist. There are also questions about whether to include recommendations (usually Lintian info/pedantic tags) in this, or just requirements. The latter probably makes more sense since maintainers bump standards-version based on requirements that they have satisfied, not recommendations. Thanks for considering these suggestions! -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (100, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.11.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages lintian depends on: ii binutils 2.29-4 ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1 ii diffstat 1.61-1+b1 ii dpkg 1.18.24 ii file 1:5.31-1 ii gettext 0.19.8.1-2+b1 ii intltool-debian 0.35.0+20060710.4 ii libapt-pkg-perl 0.1.32+b2 ii libarchive-zip-perl 1.59-1 ii libclass-accessor-perl 0.34-1 ii libclone-perl 0.38-2+b2 ii libdpkg-perl 1.18.24 ii libemail-valid-perl 1.202-1 ii libfile-basedir-perl 0.07-1 ii libipc-run-perl 0.96-1 ii liblist-moreutils-perl 0.416-1+b3 ii libparse-debianchangelog-perl 1.2.0-12 ii libperl5.26 [libdigest-sha-perl] 5.26.0-5 ii libtext-levenshtein-perl 0.13-1 ii libtimedate-perl 2.3000-2 ii liburi-perl 1.72-1 ii libxml-simple-perl 2.24-1 ii libyaml-libyaml-perl 0.63-2+b2 ii man-db 2.7.6.1-2 ii patchutils 0.3.4-2 ii perl 5.26.0-5 ii t1utils 1.40-2 ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.3 Versions of packages lintian recommends: ii libperlio-gzip-perl 0.19-1+b4 Versions of packages lintian suggests: pn binutils-multiarch <none> ii dpkg-dev 1.18.24 ii libhtml-parser-perl 3.72-3+b2 ii libtext-template-perl 1.46-1 -- no debconf information -- Sean Whitton
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