Hi, [This mail is a side-effect of trying to fix the remaining part of the RC bug #1025868 against lintian.]
I'm thinking about retiring the tag bin-sbin-mismatch due difficult to solve false positive (and currently triggering an RC bug). It has been introduced in #930702 and sounded like a good idea, but caused quite some not so trivial to fix issues (if fixable at all), especially false positives: * #1017632: false positives on partial matchs — IMHO unfixable. * #974677: false positive when using variables — probably partially fixable (i.e. unfixable) by ignoring cases where "}" stands directly before "/bin/" and maybe where "\$\w+" matches before directly before "/bin/". But the first will still have some false positives (being language-dependent and at least in shell and Perl it additionally requires strict adhering to some coding standards in the tested package — which is unrealistic). * zsh: false positives when doing symlinking /bin/zsh and /usr/bin/zsh in postinst/postrm for non-usrmerge systems instead of shipping them properly in the package due to the usrmerge mess. (Not reported, just overridden.) Additionally it has the following other issues: * As far as I understand the topic, this tag is obosoleted by the forced usrmerge migration as those mismatch seem to be no more relevant since then. * Order of the output parameters seem to vary per architecture, see the remaining issue of the current RC bug #1025868 against lintian (Cc'ed). I think this is related to C compilers/linkers not generating the same variable order on different architectures, see the test case which caused the RC bug: https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/t/recipes/checks/files/contents/bin-sbin-confusion-in-elf/build-spec/orig/calls-sbin.c Paul: Expect an update on the last remaining piece of #1025868 soon. I have a working arm64 Sid again. armhf and i386 didn't suffice to reproduce. But I clearly see the problem. :-/ * Misleading tag name, at least without the full tag desc I always expect that /sbin/$program and /bin/$program are mixed up. There's no "usr" present in the tag name. A potential better tag name would be something like bin-usr-bin-mismatch (with sbin being a seldom special case of it). Other points which are no issue itself, but make the tag removal potentially a bit easier, i.e. likely reduce the impact of removal: * The tag is marked as experimental, i.e. not shown by default. * The submitter of #930702 (i.e. the feature request submitter) himself is no more active in Debian. (And he — IMHO unfortunately — rage-quitted Debian over the systemd controversy, so I doubt that he's still interested in Debian, let it be alone Lintian. So I did not Cc him to not bother him with stuff reminding him of Debian.) And given that other recent tag removal proposals (e.g. very-long-line-length-in-source-file) lead into objections, also from my side, I'd like to hear first if there's someone who considers this tag useful. Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <a...@debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 `- | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE
