Package: lintian Version: 2.6.0 Severity: normal Hi,
the function spelling_exceptions() only considers binary packages to add exceptions to the spell checking. This leads to situation where tags like spelling-error-in-patch-description are emitted depending on whether a binary package was added to the lintian call. An example is the src:alot package where we used to have an override for spelling-error-in-patch-description but then discovered that lintian will complain about an unused tag when we also add the binary package: $ lintian --pedantic --display-info --display-experimental alot_0.8-1.dsc alot_0.8-1_amd64.changes I: alot source: out-of-date-standards-version 4.2.1 (released 2018-08-25) (current is 4.3.0) I: alot source: testsuite-autopkgtest-missing X: alot source: upstream-metadata-file-is-missing I: alot source: unused-override spelling-error-in-patch-description debian/patches/0003-alot-UnicodeEncodeError-for-search-queries-with-non-.patch alot a lot N: 0 tags overridden; 1 unused override $ lintian --pedantic --display-info --display-experimental alot_0.8-1.dsc I: alot source: out-of-date-standards-version 4.2.1 (released 2018-08-25) (current is 4.3.0) I: alot source: testsuite-autopkgtest-missing X: alot source: upstream-metadata-file-is-missing N: 1 tag overridden (1 warning) I think what instead should happen is, that the function also considers the source package, specifically the Source and Binary fields. Thanks! cheers, josch