Raphael Hertzog <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Package: debhelper
> Version: 5.0.16
> Followup-For: Bug #109642

> I'm ccing the current maintainers of lintian so that they can give their
> opinion on this bug.

> Given the opinions voiced in this bug log here's what I suggest :

> Overrides should only be placed with care, that's right, that doesn't
> mean we shouldn't make it easy. Instead we should warn the maintainer
> that the override is meant as a temporay measure until lintian is fixed.

Er, well, except there are places where an override is simply needed and
probably will be needed indefinitely.  Examples from packages I maintain:

krb5-kdc: non-standard-dir-perm

    Yes, that's the directory that contains the server's keys, and it
    should indeed be mode 700.

krb5-user: setuid-binary

    Yup, that's the whole point of ksu.

libkrb53: package-name-doesnt-match-sonames

    And if it ever changes SONAMEs, we'll fix this, but changing the
    package name of a Priority: standard package just to make the package
    name match the SONAME isn't a particularly great idea.  :)

openafs-client: postinst-uses-db-input

    In order to figure out whether we need to prompt or not, we have to
    check if the local cell is already configured in the standard
    CellServDB file, which we don't have access to until after the package
    is installed.  Ugly, but I don't see a better alternative.

Another excellent example is a case where the man pages for a package are
in a different package that the first depends on, which is a long-standing
known limitation of lintian that probably won't be fixed (at least any
time soon).

I'm fairly careful about making sure that all my packages are
lintian-clean, and the above overrides are not just temporarily
workarounds for broken lintian checks.  They deal with cases where it
would be very hard for lintian to have enough information to understand
that this isn't the place for that diagnostic.

It's certainly not that difficult to install lintian overrides manually,
but I must admit I would like to see a debhelper tool to make it simpler
and more like the other control files of the package.

> Maybe the dh_lintian script should systematically print a prominent
> warning in the build log asking the maintainer to check wether the
> lintian override is still needed ?

Ew.

> But IMHO, debian/<package>.lintian-overrides should automatically be
> installed in /usr/share/lintian/overrides/<package> by one of the dh_*
> script (maybe dh_lintian could be folded into a generic dh_ script?).

Please make it just <package>.lintian; the directory listing of the debian
directory is bad enough as is without adding more extra-wide filenames.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED])               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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