On 2013-02-19 07:32, Hideki Yamane wrote: > Hi, > > I've hit upon an idea, named "Lintian ratcheting" approach to improve > Debian packages. > see > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VZWGzccH_v9kbsjACRMhr0fgUllKqb1mmfWi7LkfE8A/edit?usp=sharing > > Any comments are welcome. > >
Hi, Interesting idea and I truly appreciate the interest in getting a Lintian clean archive. The server side option reminds me of the FTP-master auto-rejects. However, I fear this idea will make people more frustrated with Lintian and simply attempt to bypass the "ratchet" (or throw us a fit). Not too long ago, the FTP-masters fixed a bug in their auto-reject code and people were not pleased that their package was suddenly rejected for "no apparent reason"[1]. So for me, that rules out the server side option. I have a feeling that the client-side approach will have a similar effect for these maintainers (assuming opt-out semantics). But with using opt-in semantics, there is no actual point in the ratchet[2]. On a related topic, consider reading Russ Allbery's mail at [3]. So, for me, a prerequisite to doing the ratchet is that Lintian is not (going to be) preceived as a "pain". Not only in correctness of results (accuracy), but also in speed. Lintian does fairly well on the "average" cases, but I fear we fail on the "rest" of the cases[4]. It would be possible to work around the accuracy problem by only considering a known accurate subset of our tags (like done with the ftp-master auto-rejects). ~Niels [1] Nevermind the fact that a -F would have told them this should have happened for ages. Also, most of the frustration I have seen so far has been on IRC, so I cannot link to it. [2] People that opt-in are probably the same people that will go over and above in fixing their Lintian warnings (and won't need the option to do it). [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lint-maint/2012/01/msg00034.html [4] For accuracy, there are plenty of false-positives around that (some not reported). For speed, consider packages like linux - all its binaries (from a single arch) and its source in a single run takes a substational amount of time (say hi to "death-by-1000-needles" man(1) on the linux-manual package). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
