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

gregor herrmann <[email protected]> Tue, 6 Jan 2026 05:30:32 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.quality-assurance
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:30:00 -0500, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote:

>On 1/4/26 5:09 AM, Holger Levsen wrote:
>>>=== Tags I'm planning to remove ===
>>>* update-debian-copyright
>>:) I'd move it to pedantic.
>AFAIU, your copyright notice doesn't need to be updated yearly to stay 
>valid, even if you add new changes. As such, I don't think Lintian 
>should promote busy work.

Also, for team uploads, I'm not bumping other people's copyright 
years, and I'm not adding myself for a trivial routine update.

>>>* debian-watch-does-not-check-openpgp-signature
>>>  - last updated: 2018-12
>>>  - 35,725 entries in UDD
>>>  - This tag was changed to Experimental because it was not really actionable (#916207). I feel this is outside of the scope of what a lintian tag should recommend.
>>I disagree.
>Hmm ok, let's keep this one then.

:sadface:

I think this is the lintian tag I hate the most, because (Meta)CPAN 
doesn't support signatures, so I'm seeing this tag for each and 
every update of a Perl package, and I can't do anything about it.

I remember the times when I had "lintian-clean" packages, and 
required this from new contributors. This ended with the invention of 
debian-watch-does-not-check-openpgp-signature (and since then many 
other questionable/unactionable tags).

Oh, and thanks for this cleanup initiative, which seems to go in the 
direction of making me a more happy lintian user again :)

Cheers,
gregor

-- 
  .''`.  https://info.comodo.priv.at -- Debian Developer https://www.debian.org
  : :' : OpenPGP fingerprint D1E1 316E 93A7 60A8 104D  85FA BB3A 6801 8649 AA06
  `. `'  Member VIBE!AT & SPI Inc. -- Supporter Free Software Foundation Europe
    `-

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 963 B)