In January, I did a “TV-shop ad”-style post on a little script called “lintian-overrider” and it prompted Simon to ask:
That’s a great tool, but don’t you fear it makes unjustified overrides too easy ?
In my experience, people sometimes have issues writing overrides (justified or not). In fact it sometimes leaves them really frustrated with Lintian. If that frustration eventually leads to them reject Lintian, then we are doing the project a disservice. I will quote Russ Allbery as I believe he covered when he wrote:
I care most about all of the regular Debian developers [...] continuing to use Lintian, so that Lintian can stay as effective as it is now at getting people to make archive-wide changes. [...] This only works if we can get nearly everyone uploading packages to run Lintian all the time.
If a handful of people adds overrides for tags they should not have, then we can fix that (e.g. by filing a bug against their packages). But it is unlikely that we will ever make them run Lintian again once they have boycott it.
