On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 at 15:06:07 +0100, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> The second category is named "error" and the tags listed can not be
> overridden.

I don't think it's appropriate to make, for instance, dir-or-file-in-var-www
instantly fatal without following the usual mass-bug-filing procedure. If
you'd like mass bugs to be filed based on these lintian tags but don't have
time, let me know if I can help (I can't promise to deal with all of them).

I'm not arguing that dir-or-file-in-var-www is not a bug - it is - but it's a
technical problem that needs a transition (moving files around,
reconfiguration, probably a migration path in many cases), rather than just
some incorrect boilerplate in debian/copyright that can easily be fixed before
uploading. Thankfully, we have a procedure to deal with buggy packages, i.e.
a bug tracking system :-) together with processes for NMU or removal of
packages that are too buggy.

I'm in favour of auto-rejecting packages with very serious packaging problems,
but auto-rejecting makes bugs "worse than RC", so IMO it's necessary to be
more conservative about existing packages - if your package has an RC bug
open, you can still upload it to fix other (possibly RC) bugs, but if your
package is being auto-rejected, you have no choice but to fix the auto-reject
before the next (successful) upload.

I realise this is somewhat deliberate, to give maintainers a strong incentive
to fix their packages. However, it seems disproportionate: we don't enforce
that for RC bugs, even those with severity 'critical', so this is effectively
creating a class of bugs more severe than 'critical'. It seems unwise to do
that without the relevant bugs at least being tracked as RC first!

Some examples of tags I consider reasonable to auto-reject, because they
should be easy to fix (but many of them should be bug reports anyway):
    - binary-file-compressed-with-upx
    - copyright-lists-upstream-authors-with-dh_make-boilerplate
    - missing-dependency-on-perlapi
    - section-is-dh_make-template

Some examples of tags where I do not consider this reasonable until bugs have
been filed:
    - statically-linked-binary
    - mknod-in-maintainer-script
    - debian-rules-not-a-makefile
    - dir-or-file-in-var-www

Regards,
    Simon

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