On May 7, 2018 1:26:36 AM UTC, Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote: >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.
I think this is an excellent idea. Thanks, Scott K