Chris Lamb <la...@debian.org> writes: > However, my experience with being an author of a handful of static > analysis tools is that people have a slight tendency to delegate > thinking to the computer's output. The addition of an objective target > (ie. zero output) only encourages our post-lapsarian brains to make > poor, err, compromises.
> Do correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the angle Scott was > pushing. :) > How could we make --pedantic more useful/obvious/something? Ironically, > if it were less useful in a strict sense — for example, if we moved some > P: tags to I: — it would get less incorrect usage. :p My modest proposal, and this is going to sound nuts so bear with me for a moment, would be to make it impossible to get pedantic tags and regular tags at the same time. If you use --pedantic, suppress all other tags. This problem stems from the fact that people are using Lintian as if pickier is better, and the deeper they go into Lintian's settings while keeping the package clear of any output, the better the package is. And that's true, up to a point -- moving from error to warning is certainly significant, and moving from warning to info is probably significant. But pedantic was a collection of tags that were mostly designed for a far different purpose: you run them on a package to ask for a set of things that might be out of step with common best practices or that you may want to consider changing if you've not touched the package in years. It's much more of a one-time thing. You run it, you look at the tags and read the descriptions (I would argue that --pedantic is basically useless without --info, and perhaps --pedantic should force --info, particularly if one implements my modest proposal), you decide which ones make sense and which ones don't, and then you fix the ones you like and move on with your life. Lintian has emitted pedantic warnings about some of my packages for not having an upstream changelog for literally years. This is never going to be fixed; upstream is not going to make a changelog, and I'm not going to make an artificial one. The correct disposition of that tag is for me to ignore it completely, *but it's still useful* for new packages when I'm doing initial packaging and may have forgotten to include the right debhelper command to copy over upstream's unconventionally-named changelog. If we *force* people to not treat --pedantic the same as other severity levels and *force* it to be a separate pass that you only run in specific situations, maybe this will finally get through to people, since arguing with people in debian-mentors that they're using Lintian wrong doesn't seem to be working. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>