Hi, The Lintian team has been working hard to make Lintian better. Some call it a policy enforcer, but from our perspective Lintian just provides friendly packaging advice for the benefit of maintainers.
A pending change may affect anyone who looks at Lintian's output. We would like to get your thoughts before taking the next step. I am about to introduce private namespaces for tags. Many tags already point to the check that issued them. (For those who don't know, a 'check' in Lintian is a module that issues a tag.) Namespaces would formalize the relationship. For example, the tag 'debian-copyright-file-uses-obsolete-national-encoding' might become 'national-encoding@debian/copyright'. There are many motivations: 1. Shortens tag names. 2. Points to the code that issued the tag. 3. Frees up name space (good tags are rare). 4. Multiple checks can use the same tag in different contexts (i.e. 'spelling'). 5. Preempts name conflicts in case some check-writing is delegated to expert teams. 6. Quicker to split large checks when components reuse tag names. 7. Brings consistency between Lintian and custom profile users, such pkg-perl-tools and pkg-js-tools, who already have private namespaces. The change is technically easy. (Lintian even has a way to track renamed tags for overrides.) On an optical level, however, the change will affect a lot of people. It could even cause headaches for some users, for example in derivatives. We would like to solicit your input. Please provide your thoughts, perspectives and suggestions by amending the bug report at #943525. Thank you! Kind regards, Felix Lechner P.S. If you run Lintian in a GNOME terminal, you should now see some hyperlinks.