Bug#1007002: lintian: transition to "pointed hints" has invalidated many overrides
Package: lintian
Version: 2.114.0
Severity: important
There seems to be an ongoing transition in Lintian, in which hints that
report a filename or line in an ad-hoc way are being converted to "pointed
hints" that use a new format with the filename in square brackets.
One of the design decisions that keeps Lintian's value high as a
QA tool is that all of its hints (formerly known as tags) can be
overridden if the maintainer has assessed the hint and determined that
it is a false-positive or otherwise inapplicable to this particular
package. Unfortunately, changing a hint to a pointed hint invalidates
most overrides for that hint (unless they use a very broad wildcard match,
which seems like a bad idea since it could hide unrelated instances of the
hint that genuinely indicate a problem). I can see why it is considered
valuable to have a consistent format for all hints, but mass-invalidating
existing overrides seems like a high price to pay for that.
This is particularly frustrating when the overrides that would be required
to silence a hint on lintian.debian.org and the overrides that would
be required to silence a hint with the released version of Lintian are
mutually incompatible. https://lintian.debian.org/tags/mismatched-override
currently reports 15K mismatched overrides among 3K source packages,
which seems like a lot.
It would be useful if Lintian could treat previously-valid overrides as
still being a valid way to override the new form of a tag, particularly
in the common case where "foo usr/share/bar" has been replaced by
"foo [usr/share/bar]".
smcv
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