Bug#1014255: Long lines should also be ignored from non-code text files

[Russ Allbery]

"Dr. Bas Wijnen"  writes:

> Axel writes that README.md and LICENSE are likely valid cases. I
> disagree.  While I (and I expect many developers in Debian) are used to
> using short lines in text files, this is not that common for other
> people. Many will use the automatic word-wrap feature of text editors
> and write a whole paragraph on a single line.

Or, if not a whole paragraph, there are pretty strong arguments for
following https://xkcd.com/1285/ whenever writing in any markup language,
including Markdown, which can lead to long lines for complex sentences.
That's the standard for our projects at my current employer.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)  

Bug#1014255: Long lines should also be ignored from non-code text files

[Louis-Philippe Véronneau]

On 2023-08-02 15 h 01, Dr. Bas Wijnen wrote:

Hi,

Axel writes that README.md and LICENSE are likely valid cases. I disagree.
While I (and I expect many developers in Debian) are used to using short lines
in text files, this is not that common for other people. Many will use the
automatic word-wrap feature of text editors and write a whole paragraph on a
single line.

I don't think I should ask upstream to reformat their non-code text files; it's
not a good use of their time, and also they would likely not even do it.

Instead, I hope lintian can avoid emitting this tag for non-code text files (in
particular: *.txt, *.html, *.md). Although CMakeLists.txt is probably an
exception: that is code and it shouldn't contain long lines.

I could add overrides, but I don't think this would be an appropriate case for
that. But please let me know if it is.

Thanks,
Bas



Note that the 'very-long-line-length-in-source-file' was marked as 
'experimental' in this commit [1] exactly for that kind of reason.


The default lintian mode doesn't use the 'experimental' tags and I would 
advise you not to include them if this tag is currently bothering you.


[1]: 
https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/899bd1b683c479e166ebd465ff0ad101fbd04ee2


--
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Louis-Philippe Véronneau
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   po...@debian.org / veronneau.org
  ⠈⠳⣄



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Bug#1014255: Long lines should also be ignored from non-code text files

[Dr. Bas Wijnen]

Hi,

Axel writes that README.md and LICENSE are likely valid cases. I disagree.
While I (and I expect many developers in Debian) are used to using short lines
in text files, this is not that common for other people. Many will use the
automatic word-wrap feature of text editors and write a whole paragraph on a
single line.

I don't think I should ask upstream to reformat their non-code text files; it's
not a good use of their time, and also they would likely not even do it.

Instead, I hope lintian can avoid emitting this tag for non-code text files (in
particular: *.txt, *.html, *.md). Although CMakeLists.txt is probably an
exception: that is code and it shouldn't contain long lines.

I could add overrides, but I don't think this would be an appropriate case for
that. But please let me know if it is.

Thanks,
Bas