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

gregor herrmann <[email protected]> Tue, 6 Jan 2026 05:46:45 +0100

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

On Tue, 06 Jan 2026 03:43:07 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:

>> * application-in-library-section
>> * library-package-name-for-application

(… which mostly appear together, so if anything, one should be enough 
…)

>I actually think most of the problems flagged by this are valid. With
>packages incorrectly marked as libs, or programs shipped in shared
>library packages, or in python or perl module packages, or
>non-development programs marked with their implementation language which
>should be irrelevant. But given that for interpreted languages we do not
>have the libs vs libdevel vs devel distinction, the language section gets
>all these into it. :/

 From the perl perspective, these tags are mostly annoying; aside from 
explicit applications, which shouldn't be named libFOO-BAR-perl and 
probably also shouldn't be in section: perl, there are many libraries 
which have some nice script included.

Which leads to lintian overrides with comments like

# We're a library, but have a handy application bundled in the distribution
# We're a library with a handy command-line utility
# This is a library which includes a convenience CLI script
# We're a Perl library, but we contain some helper scripts

etc.

>Perhaps a compromise for now could be to ignore language specific
>sections for now? (Although as mentioned above, I think several of those
>are actual problems IMO.)

This would indeed be nice from my POV.


Cheers,
gregor

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