On Fri, 2017-05-19 at 10:55 +0200, Stephan Kulow wrote:
But if packagers ignore rpmlint, it's up to the reviewers to have a look if (more important) warnings were ignored. And this is a tiresome work and if you do it often a day your focus shifts towards details. Thankfully our review team *does* it often a day and it's an important part of our development process. So bear with them heading into details and support them by not questioning *everything* they say.
Now I would like to stress that this goes into both directions - reviewers tend to forget how important the 99.9% are that make up packaging and are not summaries with dots. So they need to put themselves into 'imperfect packager's shows more often. Because I think "that will teach them" is a) a signal of abuse of power and b) a signal of 'us vs them', that is very unhealthy in this context.
So please guys: work together not against each other.
I apologize for the bad wording in my mail - the ':)' after 'make it an error' did obviously not give away sufficiently that this was not entirely serious. There are definitively other rpmlint warnings that would be worth more effort than 'summary does not end in dot' (that one is a pure aesthetic question - of course it appears 'weird' in YaST Software manager if the packag summary is a sentence; and such details are in the end what makes up a polished distro. Keep in mind: you can have a technically perfect product, but if all screens are full of spelling errors, you're still not going to take the product serious. The part which I was hiding in my message was rather: find an rpmlint that is worth addressing to raise the quality, idnetify packages currently failing the test and then start working on closing the gap. Many of the rpmlints could simply do with 'more description' why somebody thinks it is important. Once this becomes clear to packages, many tend to actually have less trouble following them. And, it does obviously not help that there are a bunch of rpmlint checks that are simply wrong all the time (I mostly hit them around the topics of shared library packages, where there keeps to be complaints about missing deps in -devel and the like) so recap: find hurting ones, fix them in the existing packages, find false positives, report them as bug against rpmlint and get them away. The more reliable rpmlint reports, the more we (the reviewers and packagers) can actually take its output as reason for action. Cheers, Dominique