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

Xiyue Deng <[email protected]> Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:16:44 -0800

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

Hi Mattia,

Mattia Rizzolo <[email protected]> writes:

> [...]
>
>> * prefer-uscan-symlink
>>  - last updated: 2021-11
>>  - 14,294 entries in UDD
>>  - This tag asks individual users to change their ~/.devscripts
>> configuration file instead of using the filenamemangle option in
>> debian/watch. I don't understand how an individual change can be the
>> solution to a collective problem?
>
> I don't recall completely the origin, but I believe I was partly
> responsible for this: I'm of the strong opinion that `uscan` should
> default to provide a useful filename, instead of littering all d/watches
> with filenamemangle= rules.
> I still believe so.
>

Thanks for the background of this tag so that I can understand the
rationale of it better.  Though it now looks like it's pointing out a
limitation/bug in default uscan settings instead of any maintainer
error.  I think when the default file name generated by uscan is
incorrect, fixes using filenamemangle can be shared with other
maintainers/uploaders while using ~/.devscripts cannot and thus less
helpful for team maintenance.  The recent version 5 watch file made a
great step forward with the Template system so that this happens less
for major hosting services like GitHub/GitLab.  But it is still needed
for less common hosting services and there is unlikely a solution for
everything, so filenamemangle may still be needed occasionally.

Just my 2c.

-- 
Regards,
Xiyue Deng

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