Hi Andreas, Andreas Tille wrote: > I realised that lintian (at least) starting with version 2.115.1 (may be > earlier) wraps file names into [] which breaks existing > lintian-overrides.
Correct, except that it happened for quite a while (7 months at least) and was (and maybe still is — see below) a continuous transition. It is present since at least 2.114.0 from November 2021. According to the git history, the implementation started shortly before the 2.114.0 upload, but the bug report which requested this is actually from 2014: https://bugs.debian.org/743226 And yes, 2.115.0 (but not 2.115.1 or 2.115.2 from today) had more such changes as there were over 200 commits from Felix included which he did after 2.114.0, but which weren't uploaded since then. Many of them were (IMHO irresponsibly) marked "Gbp-Dch: Ignore" and hence didn't show up in debian/changelog when I generated it with "gbp dch". (I though ignored that in some cases and added them manually to the debian/changelog entry, partially even retroactively.) > I consider these [] not helpful […] no visible advantage. The advantage is to clearly mark what is a file with potentially a line number in the output of lintian so that further processors like the lintian website can do deep links to the proper code position on e.g. sources.debian.org or salsa.debian.org. Felix called it "pointed hints". From my point of view, that's quite an advantage. See also https://bugs.debian.org/1007002 for the proper bug report about the issue with invalidating overrides by this transition. I've added it to the Cc of this thread and dropped lintian-ma...@debian.org instead as mails to that bug report get forwarded to the Lintian Team anyway. > since it breaks lots of lintian-overrides Felix decided that it's worth to implement this requested feature and I at least partially agree as I do clearly see the advantage and also like the possibilities which this now offers. > Could this change in lintian please be reverted? I clearly won't do that — for multiple reasons: * Far too much work for the gain (IMHO) * Losing a requested feature. * Invalidating 7 months of already updated overrides. * Better ways to invest your (and my) time. (See my proposition below.) Background: This seems not to have been one big commit but many small commits whenever a tag was touched by Felix. Reverting it to the old format would be a huge effort for which I don't have the time as there are way more pressing issues in lintian. And I'm very sure it can't be done by just doing a bunch of "git revert". So far I found 15 commits by Felix mentioning "pointed hint" reaching from November 2021 to March 2022. With about 200 other, partially quite invasive commits inbetween. And in addition to that, it's IMHO _far_ too late, because many maintainers already have updated their overrides in the past 7 months. And I'm currently not sure if I would even accept a Merge Request which tries to do that. But I doubt that anyone would a) make that effort and b) make all those maintainers angry who already updated their overrides in the past 7 months or more. Roberto C. Sánchez wrote: > Or perhaps make the new format default That was Felix' plan, yes. I just have currently no idea how many tags have been and how many haven't been converted yet. If there aren't too many tags left, I might finish this transition. If there are many tags left, I'd only do that if we have a way to cope with it with much less effort than it so far caused. And from my point of view, the only way to get out of this mess without causing too much work for anyone (maintainers of packages with affected overrides as well as the current Lintian maintainers): Someone should write a converter from the old to the new format. That doesn't sound too difficult. Main work would be gathering for each tag involved how it looked beforehand and how it looked now. This probably can be gathered from changes in git to Lintian's test suite. And maybe it should even try to output overrides which are compatible with the old and new format, at least in cases where the order of parameters didn't change. See lintian's own overrides for some examples: https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/debian/source/lintian-overrides (Although this also accounts for a bug which only ever was present in Lintian's git repository and never got uploaded, but still got an RC bug report because people started using lintian off the git repo due to it no having been maintained for months: https://bugs.debian.org/1003353) Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <a...@debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 `- | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE
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