XPost: linux.debian.bugs.dist

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.52
Severity: wishlist

Dear maintainers,

At the Debian Policy BoF at DebConf17, it was suggested that Lintian
start tracking metadata that connects up Lintian tags and releases of
Debian Policy.

Looking at my notes from the BoF, there are two types of metadata that
could be useful:

1. tag metadata indicating the release of policy that added the
requirement or recommendation checked by the tag

For example, a Lintian tag emitted when a package installs both a
menu entry and a desktop entry would have '4.0.1' for the value of
this piece of metadata. That's because policy 4.0.1 introduced the
requirement that a package not install both a menu entry and a
desktop entry.

2. for each Lintian release, a list of policy versions such that for
each version V, if the Standards-Version of a package is the version
of policy immediately prior to V and the package is Lintian clean,
the Standards-Version may be bumped to V

It should be clear how (2) is useful to package maintainers: if their
package has Standards-Version 4.0.0, the package is Lintian clean under
the latest release of Lintian and the list of versions in (2) for the
latest release of Lintian includes 4.0.1, they may bump their
Standards-Version to 4.0.1 without working through the upgrading
checklist.

(1) is useful for constructing (2): we can compare the list of tags
which have 4.0.1 as their value for (1) to the upgrading checklist for
policy release 4.0.1, and if each item in the list is covered by a tag,
we may add 4.0.1 to (2) for the next release of Lintian.

We would expect this metadata to be quite incomplete, both because it is time-consuming to compile and because not all new policy requirements
can be checked by Lintian tags. This incompleteness would not prevent
the metadata from being useful to maintainers where it does exist.

There are also questions about whether to include recommendations
(usually Lintian info/pedantic tags) in this, or just requirements. The
latter probably makes more sense since maintainers bump
standards-version based on requirements that they have satisfied, not recommendations.

Thanks for considering these suggestions!

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (100, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.11.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii binutils 2.29-4
ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1
ii diffstat 1.61-1+b1
ii dpkg 1.18.24
ii file 1:5.31-1
ii gettext 0.19.8.1-2+b1
ii intltool-debian 0.35.0+20060710.4
ii libapt-pkg-perl 0.1.32+b2
ii libarchive-zip-perl 1.59-1
ii libclass-accessor-perl 0.34-1
ii libclone-perl 0.38-2+b2
ii libdpkg-perl 1.18.24
ii libemail-valid-perl 1.202-1
ii libfile-basedir-perl 0.07-1
ii libipc-run-perl 0.96-1
ii liblist-moreutils-perl 0.416-1+b3
ii libparse-debianchangelog-perl 1.2.0-12
ii libperl5.26 [libdigest-sha-perl] 5.26.0-5
ii libtext-levenshtein-perl 0.13-1
ii libtimedate-perl 2.3000-2
ii liburi-perl 1.72-1
ii libxml-simple-perl 2.24-1
ii libyaml-libyaml-perl 0.63-2+b2
ii man-db 2.7.6.1-2
ii patchutils 0.3.4-2
ii perl 5.26.0-5
ii t1utils 1.40-2
ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.3

Versions of packages lintian recommends:
ii libperlio-gzip-perl 0.19-1+b4

Versions of packages lintian suggests:
pn binutils-multiarch <none>
ii dpkg-dev 1.18.24
ii libhtml-parser-perl 3.72-3+b2
ii libtext-template-perl 1.46-1

-- no debconf information

--
Sean Whitton

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