This message is written with my Lintian maintainer hat on, not with my technical committee member hat on, to be clear.
Raphael Hertzog <hert...@debian.org> writes: > On Thu, 11 Mar 2010, Cyril Brulebois wrote: >> following the instructions given by Frans in [1], I've written a tiny >> check to ensure I wasn't missing any occurrences in the bunch of udebs >> I'm currently adding. I guess it would be better to check what happens >> in the resulting binaries, but I wanted to be aware of such issues >> *before* even building those packages; that's why I implemented it so >> that it checks the source control file. Hopefully, you'll get the idea >> and either move it entirely, or only “duplicate” it for the binary >> packages. >> >> 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2010/02/msg00524.html > [...] >> +Tag: package-type-in-debian-control >> +Severity: important >> +Certainty: certain >> +Info: There is a Package-Type field in the <tt>debian/control</tt> >> + file. This field is only relevant to the build process and should >> + not be embedded in the resulting binary package. As a consequence, >> + XC-Package-Type should be used instead. > I'm a bit annoyed with lintian officializing usage of the non-official > field name. On the Lintian side, I saw the patch come in from someone who's actively working on udebs, checked the history cited in the patch, saw that it was requested by Frans Pop, and considered that a fairly authoritative source for what d-i wants. In Lintian, the d-i team is considered authoritative on what should and should not be checked in udebs. We will almost never second-guess the d-i team on anything related to udebs, since they exist for the use of the installer and involve special issues peculiar to them. I think the only major thing we ever pushed back on is insisting on keeping Standards-Version in the source packages for udebs. > It's counterproductive IMO. The issue should be resolved at the dpkg > level. Unfortunately the underlying issue has never been resolved > between Guillem and the d-i team, you can find the discussion here: > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=452273 There seems to be a lot of bikeshed painting going on there. While I'm sympathetic to Guillem's desire to generalize, given that the d-i team owns the bikeshed in question, I'd personally be inclined to let them paint it whatever color they want. > Hence I'm seeking advice from the technical committee. In the mean time, > I think this warning should not be kept in lintian. As a Lintian maintainer, I'm not (yet) seeing a good reason to remove it. Note that other parts of Lintian already expect XC-Package-Type and don't recognize Package-Type, so it's the path of least resistance in Lintian to keep it as-is, although we also could fix that depending on the results of this discussion. Currently, XC-Package-Type seems to be the way that this is done, so at the least Lintian is currently requesting consistency. In the face of debate, consistency is always a good default position. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
