Re: Cleaning out Lintian's "Experimental: yes" tags

Holger Levsen <holger-Yq+U+nADzX/[email protected]> writes:

> On Sun, Jan 04, 2026 at 12:03:46AM -0500, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote:
>> In an act of productive procrastination, I spent a few hours
>> yesterday looking at the tags in Lintian that are currently marked
>> as "Experimental: yes".
>
> yay & thank you for that!
>  
>> As far as I understand, very few people run Lintian at the
>> experimental level, which means these tags are still ran, but not
>> really shown to users (and thus waste CPU cycles).
>
> this does not compute however, or is it really the case that lintian checks
> for experiemental issues *always* while only showing them if asked? If so,
> I'd think the obvious fix would be to only run them if asked to?

+1


>> === Tags I'm planning to remove ===
>> 
>> * update-debian-copyright
>>  - last updated: 2022-12
>>  - 22,597 entries in UDD
>>  - This tag was highly controversial when it was implemented and I don't see its usefulness.
>
> :) I'd move it to pedantic.

but to be properly pedantic, isnt it the case that not many changes in debian/rules are
copyrightable?

(eg, if i download a pakage on 31 Dec and rebuild it for stable on 1
Jan, will i get this tag because i changed debian/changelog to
refer to stable not unstable?)