On Sun, Jan 04, 2026 at 12:03:46AM -0500, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote: > In an act of productive procrastination, I spent a few hours yesterday looking at the tags in Lintian that are currently marked as "Experimental: yes". yay & thank you for that! > As far as I understand, very few people run Lintian at the experimental level, which means these tags are still ran, but not really shown to users (and thus waste CPU cycles). this does not compute however, or is it really the case that lintian checks for experiemental issues *always* while only showing them if asked? If so, I'd think the obvious fix would be to only run them if asked to? (I care because I do run lintian on experimental level always (pedantic too) and thus I also very much appreciate your cleanup!) > === Tags I'm planning to remove === > > * update-debian-copyright > - last updated: 2022-12 > - 22,597 entries in UDD > - This tag was highly controversial when it was implemented and I don't see its usefulness. :) I'd move it to pedantic. > * spelling-error-in-binary > - last updated: 2019-03 > - 336,571 entries in UDD > - As many pointed out, this tag frequently has false positives and even when the issue is valid, it's often hard to fix them upstream. same. > * systemd-service-file-missing-hardening-features > - last updated: 2018-12 > - 6,458 entries in UDD > - This check only looks if the systemd service file includes at least 1 feature in a long list of "hardening" features. IMO, this is an overly simplistic solution to a very hard problem. agreed. > * binary-file-built-without-LFS-support > - last updated: 2019-09 > - 25,628 entries in UDD > - To comply with this tag, the description mentions "[upstream] code review might be needed". Considering the number of packages flagged and the difficulty of the task, I feel this is outside of the scope of what a lintian tag should recommend. i'm surprised we still have that many LFS issues! > * debian-watch-does-not-check-openpgp-signature > - last updated: 2018-12 > - 35,725 entries in UDD > - This tag was changed to Experimental because it was not really actionable (#916207). I feel this is outside of the scope of what a lintian tag should recommend. I disagree. > * duplicate-files > - last updated: 2019-10 > - 117,663 entries in UDD > - This tag has been Experimental since 2011 and asks maintainers to do very complex work (hunting and replacing "duplicate" files by symlinks) for very little results. I feel this is outside of the scope of what a lintian tag should recommend. why? I think this is exactly in scope. > * dependency-on-python-version-marked-for-end-of-life > - 1 entry in UDD > - Python 2 has been removed from the archive a while ago and isn't coming back. I have opened #1124516 to flag this issue for the only package that raises this check. so it is valid? [...] > === Tags I think should be kept as Experimental === > * very-long-line-length-in-source-file this one I think should/can go :) > * source-is-missing should definitly stay. [...] Thank you very much for your work on lintian! Please do take my comments as comments or opinions, but not demands or some such. -- cheers, Holger ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ holger@(debian|reproducible-builds|layer-acht).org ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ OpenPGP: B8BF54137B09D35CF026FE9D 091AB856069AAA1C ⠈⠳⣄ "A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide. (...) It must be said that the reality of transgender identity cannot be challenged. Transgender people have existed throughout history." https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/statement-on-the-genocidal-nature-of-the-gender-critical-movement%E2%80%99s-ideology-and-practice
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature