I would like to respectfully disagree will some of the opinions expressed in this email.
First, I should say that I am painfully aware of how long it takes to run lintian on large packages. When working on qtwebengine-opensource-src it takes my system (Ryzen 7 5700G) about 2 hours to build the package and about half an hour to run lintian against it. I would be completely in favor of any efforts that could be made in the direction of making lintian more efficient, either within lintian itself or in other packages that replicate some or all of lintain’s functionality in more efficient ways. However, I personally find lintian to be one of the most helpful tools in Debian packaging. When going through the application process I found lintian to be a very useful tool in helping me learn how to produce packages that conform to Debian’s standards. The integration of lintian into mentors.debian.net was very helpful to me when I first started submitting packages to Debian, and it is still helpful to me when reviewing other people’s packages that have been submitted to mentors.debian.net. As I type this email I am building an update to qtwebengine-opensource-src. So far, lintian has caught two problems with this release that I would have otherwise missed. I admit that I am fairly new as a Debian Developer, and perhaps as I gain greater experience I would get to the point where lintian never catches things I miss. But I don’t personally expect that to ever happen, because there are too many corner cases or opportunities for typos that computers are much better at catching than humans. I do understand that lintian is in need of a lot of work. I personally have an open MR against the package that fixes a check that is wrong more often than it is right (with both false positives and false negatives). The fix is relatively simple and makes the check 100% accurate as far as I can tell. However, after over a year, it has yet to be reviewed. https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/461[1] I must admit that I have been sorely tempted to get involved with maintaining lintian because I feel it is so important. So far, I have resisted that temptation because I am already involved in a decade-long effort to clean up Qt WebEngine in Debian and get it to the point where it has proper security support. I haven’t wanted to spread myself too thin and end up accomplishing nothing because I tried to do too much. But if lintian’s need increases or if my existing commitments decrease I would be happy to find myself involved with lintian maintenance. Soren On Thursday, May 9, 2024 12:27:49 PM MST Andreas Tille wrote: > Hi, > > this mail is a private response from Niels to my mail to the Debian Perl > team where I explicitly asked for people helping out with lintian. So > far the answer from Niels is the only response. Since he gave explicit > permission to quote him in public I'm doing so hereby. Niels assumed > that his answer "will not help my case" - but well, I do not think that > hiding problems will help anybody else. > > At Tue, May 07, 2024 at 15:59:21 +0200 Andreas Tille wrote > > > Hi Perl folks, > > ... > > --> see full mail at > > https://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2024/05/msg00000.html > [ From here I simply quote Niels unchanged - I'll comment probably tomorrow in > detail ] > >
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