On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 11:10:36AM -0300, Chris Lamb wrote: > Theodore Ts'o wrote: > > > P.S. I'm going to be adding an override in e2fsprogs for > > package-supports-alternative-init-but-no-init.d-script because it > > has false positives > > Regardless of the specifics of this particular package if Lintian > could feasibly not emit this false-positive, would it surely not be > more sensible to get this fixed there instead?
There is a bug open against Lintian already, but it's not at all clear it's solveable short of solving the halting problem. E2fsprogs is shipping 5 systemd unit files for which the cron.d file is a rough substitute. So the only choice is whether you want false positive or false negative reports for a Lintian "Important" warning. I'm getting 5 Important Lintian errors, one for each systemd unit files. Some of them are associated with a systemd.timer setup, and some are normal system services unit files. *All* of them in combination implement the functionality which is also (mostly) provided by cron.d entry and the e2scrub_all_cron shell script. Just suppressing the warning for systemd.timer files would not be sufficient. You'd have to suppress *all* Lintian complaints of this class if there is at least one timer file and at least one cron.d file in the package. But that's going to subject to false negatives. Or, you know, you could solve the halting problem. :-) > That would not only be a cleaner solution than an override (which you > would likely just have to remove later...) it would be a general > kindness in that it could potentially save countless other developers > undergoing the same manual process as you. I prefer not to either (a) delay a release of e2fsprogs until this Lintian bug is solved, one way or another (and it's not clear it can be solved easily), or (b) deal with people complaining and filing bugs regarding the Lintian Important report. So override does seem to be the best approach, especially given how charged the whole sysvinit vs systemd controversy and my lack of faith that the Lintian bug is going to be resovled any time soon. I'd *much* rather avoid any flames directed at me caused by this false positive. - Ted