[Mageia-dev] Rpmlint configuration, false positives

Sat Mar 5 10:49:28 CET 2011

On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 10:30:36PM +0100, Michael Scherer wrote:
+> Hi,
+> 
+> so as done before on another time and land, I have pushed a rpmlint
+> specific
+> policy for Mageia, aptly named 'rpmlint-mageia-policy" ( maybe
+> rpmlint-policy-mageia would be better, not sure ).
+> 
+> For those that do not know, rpmlint is a tool to check a rpm against
+> a list
+> of rules written in python, that is used on Fedora, Mandriva, opensuse
+> and likely others too. The tool is used on upload to refuse some
+> rpms based
+> on this rules, and should be used by people to check rpms, to make
+> sure that
+> no obvious errors is still there. However, this is not a perfect tool,
+> and it can still give false positives, so people should not use without
+> understanding errors.
+> 
+> But we can filter and configure it to be a little more perfect.
+> 
+> In a rather autocratic fashion, as the maintainer of rpmlint ( both
+> packages
+> and uptream ), as a packager representative, and as a apprentice
+> dictator
+> ( since there is lots of open position in this sector since a few
+> weeks ),
+> I propose that this become the canonical source for rpmlint
+> configuration.
+> 
+> In practice, that mean that false positives will have to be added
+> there,
+> that stuff that are noted as errors need to be set in that package, and
+> any policy changes must be made there.
+> 
+> So the question is "how do we deal with evolution ( ie, how do we
+> decide
+> something is now a error, or no longer one".
+> 
+> Traditionally, packagers didn't care at all, and so the
+> configuration bitrotted
+> since a long time, and people didn't used it, and I just added false
+> positives
+> when packagers notified it ( ie, almost never, except when I noticed
+> some of them ).
+> I suspect that my lack of communication around that didn't help (
+> and so
+> people didn't knew they could ask for adding a false positive to the
+> list
+> of error to ignore ).
+> 
+> Yet, I think we can do better, so feel free to suggest any mad idea
+> for this.
+> -- 
+> Michael Scherer
+Regarding license names, I haven’t checked the code, will provide a
+patch for this, it would be nice if rpmlint could load valid license
+names from a yaml config file which will contain valid licenses as
+mentionned here:
+http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Good_Licenses_3
+
+And then I will make a script to detect wrong licenses in already
+imported packages so that we can make a fix license sprint to fix them
+
+Are you ok with that ?
+-- 
+Rémy CLOUARD
+() ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
+/\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments
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