On Sun, 2017-06-25 at 22:08:36 +0100, Chris Lamb wrote: > Guillem Jover wrote: > > > > Why is debian-rules-parses-dpkg-parsechangelog a wishlist? > > > > > > I'm a little confused by your question; are you asking why Lintian is > > > mentioning this in the first place? Or why it reports at with "wishlist" > > > severity? :) > > > > Yeah, I guess both. :) > > So, I suggested it because of the myriad ways people were parsing the > metadata from the debian/changelog, some of them buggy. Eg. they would > break on an epoch or a binNMU, etc. etc. Besides, if there is a nice > library, we might as well all standardise on using it?
Ah, I think it would be nice to explain something along these lines in the tag. I was rather confused by why the Makefile fragment was recommended over a simple already correct call. I'm also aware of few people who have a problem with the fragment as an interface. So having lintian emit tags over those and stating that they should be switched to the fragment might annoy people. > (I plan to add more regexes, so tags in this area may make more sense > then. For example, where packages are manually sedding debian/changelog > directly.) I'd probably distinguish the two main cases here. One would be using complex constructs that can be replaced by a simple: «dpkg-parsechangelog -SField» and the others that parse the field to extract parts of it. For the first I'd recommend either using the direct call or the fragment w/o a preference, and for the second I'd probably mainly recommend the fragment, with a rationale like the one you wrote above. And I'd probably stop emitting a tag for the already simple call using -S/---show-field. > The severity was probably chosen because I was unsure on the number of > false positives it might generate. Right, I guess the emitted tag and the severity seemed off for the already correct simple call case. :) Thanks, Guillem