Felix Lechner <felix.lech...@lease-up.com> writes: > On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 8:16 PM Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote:
>> I'm puzzled by why you would have changed Lintian in response to that >> bug, given that the reported problem was only with Lintian and was >> fixed sixteen years ago. > I am just working through open bugs. I didn't reply to an earlier discussion where you said something similar because you're doing a ton of excellent work on Lintian and making a lot of forward progress. I'm not active and don't want to second-guess how you're handling things. But I guess I'll say here that I think the point of a linter is externalized good taste. It's a codification of good judgment calls about the way to construct a package. That means judgment calls about whether a given suggestion is good taste or important always felt to me like a significant part of the work. > Why did you not voice your opposition as a maintainer during the past > seventeen years, or close the bug? I should have, and probably the answer is that I didn't read it in any detail. Lintian always had between 200 and 400 bugs when I was working on it, and my work style was generally to pick a bug and work on it until I could close it, rather than going through all of the bugs. I also prioritized newer bugs over older bugs. That said, I think the way I would have interpreted that bug would have been to warn about symlinks inside /usr/lib to outside of /usr/lib. On first glance, I might have thought that might be reasonable, although looking at it now, I'm not sure what problem that would cause and therefore what purpose would be served by warning about it. In general, I wouldn't assume that all the old bugs are valid or interesting. I don't think I ever did a great job of triage, particularly on older stuff. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>