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Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance?

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I would like to respectfully disagree will some of the opinions expressed in this email.

First, I should say that I am painfully aware of how long it takes to run lintian on large 
packages.  When working on qtwebengine-opensource-src it takes my system (Ryzen 7 
5700G) about 2 hours to build the package and about half an hour to run lintian against it.  
I would be completely in favor of any efforts that could be made in the direction of making 
lintian more efficient, either within lintian itself or in other packages that replicate some or 
all of lintain’s functionality in more efficient ways.

However, I personally find lintian to be one of the most helpful tools in Debian packaging.  
When going through the application process I found lintian to be a very useful tool in 
helping me learn how to produce packages that conform to Debian’s standards.  The 
integration of lintian into mentors.debian.net was very helpful to me when I first started 
submitting packages to Debian, and it is still helpful to me when reviewing other people’s 
packages that have been submitted to mentors.debian.net.

As I type this email I am building an update to qtwebengine-opensource-src.  So far, lintian 
has caught two problems with this release that I would have otherwise missed.  I admit that 
I am fairly new as a Debian Developer, and perhaps as I gain greater experience I would get 
to the point where lintian never catches things I miss.  But I don’t personally expect that to 
ever happen, because there are too many corner cases or opportunities for typos that 
computers are much better at catching than humans.

I do understand that lintian is in need of a lot of work.  I personally have an open MR 
against the package that fixes a check that is wrong more often than it is right (with both 
false positives and false negatives).  The fix is relatively simple and makes the check 100% 
accurate as far as I can tell.  However, after over a year, it has yet to be reviewed.

https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/461[1]

I must admit that I have been sorely tempted to get involved with maintaining lintian 
because I feel it is so important.  So far, I have resisted that temptation because I am 
already involved in a decade-long effort to clean up Qt WebEngine in Debian and get it to 
the point where it has proper security support.  I haven’t wanted to spread myself too thin 
and end up accomplishing nothing because I tried to do too much.  But if lintian’s need 
increases or if my existing commitments decrease I would be happy to find myself involved 
with lintian maintenance.

Soren

On Thursday, May 9, 2024 12:27:49 PM MST Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this mail is a private response from Niels to my mail to the Debian Perl
> team where I explicitly asked for people helping out with lintian.  So
> far the answer from Niels is the only response.  Since he gave explicit
> permission to quote him in public I'm doing so hereby.  Niels assumed
> that his answer "will not help my case" - but well, I do not think that
> hiding problems will help anybody else.
> 
> At Tue, May 07, 2024 at 15:59:21 +0200 Andreas Tille wrote
> 
> > Hi Perl folks,
> > ...
> > --> see full mail at
> > https://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2024/05/msg00000.html
> [ From here I simply quote Niels unchanged - I'll comment probably tomorrow in
> detail ]
> 
> 

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Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> - 2024-05-09 21:30 +0200
  Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Soren Stoutner <soren@debian.org> - 2024-05-09 23:00 +0200
    Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> - 2024-05-10 08:00 +0200
    Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de> - 2024-05-10 09:20 +0200
    Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> - 2024-05-10 12:20 +0200
      Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> - 2024-05-10 16:10 +0200
        Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Nilesh Patra <nilesh@debian.org> - 2024-05-10 16:40 +0200
          Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Nilesh Patra <nilesh@debian.org> - 2024-05-10 20:10 +0200
      Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Soren Stoutner <soren@debian.org> - 2024-05-10 22:40 +0200
  Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Andrey Rakhmatullin <wrar@debian.org> - 2024-05-10 19:50 +0200
    Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> - 2024-05-10 23:30 +0200
  Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> - 2024-05-19 12:50 +0200
    Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Andrey Rakhmatullin <wrar@debian.org> - 2024-05-19 13:10 +0200
      Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> - 2024-05-19 17:20 +0200
    Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Otto Kekäläinen <otto@debian.org> - 2024-05-20 22:10 +0200
      Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> - 2024-05-21 13:40 +0200
        Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel <frederic-emmanuel.picca@synchrotron-soleil.fr> - 2024-05-21 14:20 +0200
    Re: Any volunteers for lintian co-maintenance? Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> - 2024-05-21 15:30 +0200

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