On Wed, Oct 14, 2026 at 01:11:28AM +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote: > > The following patch changes lintian to treat masks like overrides when > > counting reported tags. With this patch applied, tags that are masked > > internally no longer count as reported, so they don't trigger "fail-on" > > for different severities. Note that it specifically does *not* trigger > > '--fail-on override'. That would be easy to implement, but I don't > > think it's the right thing to do, as a masked tag is not really under a > > package maintainer's control and doesn't indicate anything that they've > > specifically enabled in their package. > > > > This is a slight change in behavior, but I think it's a reasonable one. > > The existence of this bug highlights how confusing the current behavior > > can be. > > As such, I dislike the idea of screen altogether - it is simply easier to not > trigger certain tags when they should not be triggered rather than masking it > like this.
Yeah, this wasn't something I'd seen before and I was a bit surprised by it. I don't know the history of these screens/masks, but I suspect the idea was to simplify the creation of exceptions without requiring them to be built into the checks directly. It makes sense, but is obviously a little unexpected. > Dropping that should not be too difficult, but assessing the impact of it > would > need some analysis. I guess for now we could take your patch. > > Please make an MR -- it is much easier to review with passing CI. https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/820 noah
