Paul Wise <[email protected]> writes: > One thing I see on debian-mentors a lot is a mismatch between the > default configuration of lintian (used by most new people) and the > configuration of people reviewing packages (much more verbose). This > comes up a lot, resulting in people needing to explain the difference a > lot and people cargo-culting lintian shell aliases and configuration > files. I propose that the default configuration file be changed to > something more verbose, perhaps something like what I use (see below).
I don't think this is a good idea. The reason why Lintian is conservative about what it reports by default is because we know from past history that people will not use it if they get too many tags that they think are pointless or are annoying. While training new contributors on how to make Debian packages is an important use case, for which info and possibly pendantic is useful (experimental is not, and I don't believe anyone on debian-mentors should ever expect people to enable experimental tags), it's only one use case. I care most about all of the regular Debian developers, who still do most of the package uploads and maintain the critical packages, continuing to use Lintian, so that Lintian can stay as effective as it is now at getting people to make archive-wide changes. One of the places Lintian helps the project the most is that it can do things like start warning about not having build-arch and build-indep rules and have significant portions of the archive just get fixed without having to do anything more comprehensive or difficult. This only works if we can get nearly everyone uploading packages to run Lintian all the time. Maybe a better solution would be to improve the documentation for people who are uploading packages for sponsorship to provide a suggested .lintianrc for people who are new to packaging? (But even there, I'm rather dubious that showing new packagers pedantic tags by default is a good idea.) -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
