Package: lintian Version: 2.114.0 Severity: important There seems to be an ongoing transition in Lintian, in which hints that report a filename or line in an ad-hoc way are being converted to "pointed hints" that use a new format with the filename in square brackets.
One of the design decisions that keeps Lintian's value high as a QA tool is that all of its hints (formerly known as tags) can be overridden if the maintainer has assessed the hint and determined that it is a false-positive or otherwise inapplicable to this particular package. Unfortunately, changing a hint to a pointed hint invalidates most overrides for that hint (unless they use a very broad wildcard match, which seems like a bad idea since it could hide unrelated instances of the hint that genuinely indicate a problem). I can see why it is considered valuable to have a consistent format for all hints, but mass-invalidating existing overrides seems like a high price to pay for that. This is particularly frustrating when the overrides that would be required to silence a hint on lintian.debian.org and the overrides that would be required to silence a hint with the released version of Lintian are mutually incompatible. https://lintian.debian.org/tags/mismatched-override currently reports 15K mismatched overrides among 3K source packages, which seems like a lot. It would be useful if Lintian could treat previously-valid overrides as still being a valid way to override the new form of a tag, particularly in the common case where "foo usr/share/bar" has been replaced by "foo [usr/share/bar]". smcv