Dear maintainer, Policy is very clear that using the DEP5 copyright format is optional. Therefore, it should not have been upgraded from informative to warning.
Agreed. Cheers,
I bumped it to warning as the DFSG team wanted that to happen. I am of the opinion that warning is the right severity - it is high time that we move to a machine readable copyright for all packages at this point. I've CC'ed the dfsg team on this. If they agree upon it, I will downgrade it to info. Best, Nilesh
Lintian is the wrong venue. If you want to change Policy use the Policy process. Otherwise this presents a breach of collegiality. Cheers,
Nilesh Patra [26/Oct 12:10am +0530] wrote: Some people deliberately don't use it because they see it as make-work. There are circumstances in which DEP-5 either requires or encourages doing more work than writing a (perfectly DFSG-compliant) non-DEP-5 copyright file does. There isn't a whole project consensus that it's an unadulterated good. Since you bumped it in response to their request, that sounds reasonable, but as I say I think this falls under the purview of Policy not the DFSG team.
The team have discussed it a number of times, and we do want to move in this direction. My hope was that we can propose the appropriate policy changes after the Forky release, but if people want us to do that sooner then I'm happy to start that process. Thanks, Andrew.----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew McMillan [26/Oct 10:05am +13] wrote: It wouldn't be for the DFSG team to move in that direction, this doesn't come under your remit directly. It would be for the whole project to move in that direction. I think it would be fine to start a discussion about changing it now.
From the Lintian User Manual: *Errors (E)* The displayed message indicates a policy violation or a packaging error. For policy violations, Lintian will cite the appropriate policy section when it is invoked with the ``-i`` option. *Warnings (W)* The displayed message might be a policy violation or packaging error. A warning is usually an indication that the check is known to sometimes produce false positive alarms, because either the corresponding rule in policy has many exceptions or the check uses some sort of heuristic to find errors. *Info (I)* The displayed message is meant to inform the maintainer about a certain packaging aspect. Such messages do not usually indicate errors, but might still be of interest to the curious. They are not displayed unless the ``-I`` option is set. So wouldn't it make sense for this to be a warning since its a "packaging error"? Most packages[2] generally use DEP5 and contributors generally expect d/copyright to be in DEP5 format.
From these descriptions, IMO, Info is the correct one. I don't think it can be considered an error if a package lacks something that's completely optional. What *should* be an error is if someone tries to use DEP5 but the copyright file cannot be properly parsed, but we've already got a number of checks for that sort of thing. noah
Maytham Alsudany [28/Oct 11:52pm +08] wrote: "Error" is a strong word. It can't be an error to do something Policy explicitly allows you to do.
Hello, Bug #1151963 in lintian reported by you has been fixed in the Git repository and is awaiting an upload. You can see the commit message below and you can check the diff of the fix at: https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/b2d6bf8c486d098b40b987857d1095cc1313dcbb (this message was generated automatically) -- Greetings https://bugs.debian.org/1151963