Package: lintian Severity: wishlist I am asking this question from Lintian maintainers in a bug to formally record what the maintenance policy is.
Is Lintian maintained maintained in a backwards incompatible way? Is the intent that the same Lintian version in unstable can at any time be used to check for regressions / QA issues in packages that are prepared to be uploaded in any Debian release (unstable, testing, stable, oldstable, -backports)? Or should maintainers preparing packages to be uploaded to e.g. stable only use the Lintian version in stable and so forth? If the Lintian version in stable has a bug that affects stable and makes Lintian behave incorrectly for testing packages for stable updates, will Lintian maintainers upload a fixed Lintian version to stable? The decision on if Salsa CI should always use the unstable version of Lintian for all releases depends on the maintenance policy of Lintian, see https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/merge_requests/552. I can see that at least 2.115.1~bpo11+1 was rebuild-only upload, and at the moment there is no practice of uploading Lintian in stable/oldstable releases, which may indicate that maintainers are expected to just use newer Lintian versions on their own to get better QA results.
