On Sun, Jan 04, 2026 at 12:03:46AM -0500, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote: > In an act of productive procrastination, I spent a few hours yesterday > looking at the tags in Lintian that are currently marked as "Experimental: > yes".
yay & thank you for that!
> As far as I understand, very few people run Lintian at the experimental
> level, which means these tags are still ran, but not really shown to users
> (and thus waste CPU cycles).
this does not compute however, or is it really the case that lintian checks
for experiemental issues *always* while only showing them if asked? If so,
I'd think the obvious fix would be to only run them if asked to?
(I care because I do run lintian on experimental level always (pedantic too)
and thus I also very much appreciate your cleanup!)
> === Tags I'm planning to remove ===
>
> * update-debian-copyright
> - last updated: 2022-12
> - 22,597 entries in UDD
> - This tag was highly controversial when it was implemented and I don't see
> its usefulness.
:) I'd move it to pedantic.
> * spelling-error-in-binary
> - last updated: 2019-03
> - 336,571 entries in UDD
> - As many pointed out, this tag frequently has false positives and even when
> the issue is valid, it's often hard to fix them upstream.
same.
> * systemd-service-file-missing-hardening-features
> - last updated: 2018-12
> - 6,458 entries in UDD
> - This check only looks if the systemd service file includes at least 1
> feature in a long list of "hardening" features. IMO, this is an overly
> simplistic solution to a very hard problem.
agreed.
> * binary-file-built-without-LFS-support
> - last updated: 2019-09
> - 25,628 entries in UDD
> - To comply with this tag, the description mentions "[upstream] code review
> might be needed". Considering the number of packages flagged and the
> difficulty of the task, I feel this is outside of the scope of what a lintian
> tag should recommend.
i'm surprised we still have that many LFS issues!
> * debian-watch-does-not-check-openpgp-signature
> - last updated: 2018-12
> - 35,725 entries in UDD
> - This tag was changed to Experimental because it was not really actionable
> (#916207). I feel this is outside of the scope of what a lintian tag should
> recommend.
I disagree.
> * duplicate-files
> - last updated: 2019-10
> - 117,663 entries in UDD
> - This tag has been Experimental since 2011 and asks maintainers to do very
> complex work (hunting and replacing "duplicate" files by symlinks) for very
> little results. I feel this is outside of the scope of what a lintian tag
> should recommend.
why? I think this is exactly in scope.
> * dependency-on-python-version-marked-for-end-of-life
> - 1 entry in UDD
> - Python 2 has been removed from the archive a while ago and isn't coming
> back. I have opened #1124516 to flag this issue for the only package that
> raises this check.
so it is valid?
[...]
> === Tags I think should be kept as Experimental ===
> * very-long-line-length-in-source-file
this one I think should/can go :)
> * source-is-missing
should definitly stay.
[...]
Thank you very much for your work on lintian! Please do take my comments as
comments
or opinions, but not demands or some such.
--
cheers,
Holger
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cannot be challenged. Transgender people have existed throughout history."
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