On Sun, Sep 18, 2022 at 08:11:03AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > I think the right thing for putty here is for upstream to remove the > HTML from their VCS and tarballs, then add the generation process to > their build system and continuous integration, so that they always know > when there are problems with generating the HTML.
The HTML files have never been in PuTTY upstream's VCS. They are generated automatically as part of PuTTY's build system for release tarballs, as a convenience to people who want to build PuTTY without Halibut, since it's a somewhat niche documentation tool. Since I agree with upstream that this is a reasonable convenience, I'm not going to ask them to stop doing it. > If they refuse then you could exclude the HTML from Debian's copy of > the upstream tarball. We're not talking about opaque object code here. This is perfectly readable plain HTML that just happens to be generated from another perfectly readable text format. It's not the preferred form of modification, sure (I wouldn't edit it directly since I have the Halibut input files available, but if nobody told me that those existed then I'd happily edit the HTML without even noticing), but this package isn't covered by the GPL so that's not very relevant. I'm not going to waste a second on editing Debian's copy of the upstream tarball for this complete non-issue. I already take care to ensure that the package rebuilds the documentation from source, and there's no DFSG issue with the pre-generated files being present so there's no reason to remove them from the tarball. The only reason that the presence of pre-generated files is even coming up is because Lintian's heuristics are misfiring in a way that seems clearly incorrect and probably unintentional. > Until either lintian changes or the putty HTML gets removed, overriding > the lintian warning in putty seems the correct thing to do. Done. > If that is done, I think lintian should add more heuristics to detect > other generated HTML. The halibut generated HTML doesn't make that easy > but there are some signals that can be added I think, like this: > > halibut-1.3/bk_html.c: html_raw(&ho, "<!-- version IDs:\n"); Firstly, that's conditional and not present in the generated PuTTY documentation. (I've sent a patch upstream to add a suitable <meta name="generator"> tag, since that seems like a reasonable thing to include in any event.) Secondly, with respect, this is a distraction from the point of this bug. Feel free to file a separate bug for more detailed heuristics, but Lintian should start by making its current heuristics not entirely wrong (the presence of a .fragment.js file obviously has nothing to do with whether general HTML files are generated, only ones that have certain kinds of <script> tags). That's what I'm requesting here. Thanks, -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]