"Chris Lamb" <la...@debian.org> writes: > Controversial opinion — the "certainty" of tags is of no actionable > benefit to either the users of Lintian or its developers and should be > removed.
I may be able to provide a bit of historical context here, since I was maintaining Lintian when this was introduced. This is not disagreement with your proposal (I find your argument persuasive), just context so that you know what problem we were trying to solve. Prior to certainty, Lintian set the level of the tags directly. However, they didn't have any well-defined meaning, and there was some confusion and controversy over why a given tag would have a given level. It seemed natural to tie the severity of the tag to the severity of the bug that would be filed were one to file bugs based on lintian tags, since that was tied into other project work and judgments (policy, BTS conventions, and so forth). Debian maintainers already understood the difference between serious, important, and normal, so reusing that terminology seemed wise and it would put the level of each tag on more concrete footing. The problem, though, was that in some cases the bug would be a serious Policy violation *if Lintian were right*, but Lintian was often wrong. Certainty was an attempt to somehow capture that so that Lintian could express to the maintainer "this is a serious problem with your package if what I found is true, but there's a good chance this is a false positive." The "certain" severity was always a problem; only a few things are truly certain, since there are always special exceptions, and that's always annoyed people. From my perspective, the certainty concept is more useful for the wild-guess end of the spectrum, where it's conveying useful information ("this would be a serious problem, but we're bad at reliably detecting it"). A theory at the time was that maintainers could use these two metrics to filter output on. Maintainers that only cared about actual Policy violations, not Lintian's various advice, could filter on severity of normal (or important), but allow any certainty. Maintainers who wanted the advice but didn't want to be bothered with false positives could enable any severity but filter out certainty of wild-guess and maybe even possible. In practice, I don't think this has happened. My impression is that the classification system is more fine-grained than the users of Lintian care about, so maintaining it is to some extent wasted effort. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>