Dear Maintainer,

thanks for maintaining lintian, that helps making Debian a much better
place.

Debian (and the world in general) is a moving target, so lintian tags
appear and disappear.

to let the maintainer know about such changes, lintian has an
'alien-tag' tag, that notifies the maitnainer if they are using tags
that do not exist.

however, today i got an *error*:

now lintian has no 'library-not-linked-against-libc' tag (which is what
the error is saying).
however, this is only true for lintian>=2.128.0, and older versions
(e.g. the lintian-2.122.0 which is shipped in Debian/trixie, which is
currently *stable*) do have this tag.

as such i think it is overzealous to mark lintian-overrides that use
this tag as *erroneous*.
esp. if somebody wants to keep lintian happy on stable/old-stable/... as
well (think backports).

instead i would like to suggest to gradually fade out deprecated tags.
this means:
- use 'alien-tag' only for tags that are completely unknown to lintian
  (esp. this means tags, that were never part of lintian)
- use a separate tag, (e.g.) 'deprecated-tag', to mark tags that are no
  longer part of lintian
- lower the severity for 'deprecated-tag' to Info or Warn for all tags
  that still exist in lintian from any currently supported Debian release


mgfdasr
IOhannes