Re: guix lint should support overrides

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2022-08-24, zimoun wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Aug 2022 at 15:22, Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> But, because there is no way to silence a particular inappropriate
>> suggestion from guix lint, it becomes noise, and each person evaluating
>> the results of the package in the future then needs to take time to
>> figure out if guix lint is wrong, or something should be changed.
>
> Do you have some packages as example?  In order to be concrete about the
> false-positive and how to programatically fix them.

Off the top of my head, no, though it came up in the course of a
convesation on #guix recently, and it reminded me of advice I've gotten
in the past to just ignore a particular check on a particular package.


> For instance, do you mean exclude on specific checker for one specific
> package?

Yes, this! :)

Maybe something like:

(define-public thispackages
  (package
   (name "thispackages"
   ...
   (lint-overides
    (list
        ;; The upstream name is actually "This Packages", not a typo.
        "typo in description: 'This Packages' should be 'This Package'")) 

And then guix lint would hide or ignore things that would otherwise emit
the strings listed in lint-overrides ... or something like that. Maybe
exact match, maybe get into a little pattern matching, not
sure. Implementation is not my strong point here. :)

You might also want to add a guix lint check for unused overrides
(e.g. something that no longer triggers the issue, either fixed upstream
in guix lint itself, or some other way).


> Or teach one specific checker for one specific package in
> order to avoid an error specific to this package running this specific
> checker?

No. Maybe in some cases this might make sense, but was not what I was
suggesting.


>> The downside is this becomes one more thing to maintain... in exchange
>> for making the output having a higher degree of relevency in "guix lint"
>> output, so you can be more confident that someone hasn't already looked
>> at a given issue and decided it was best to just ignore it (not that
>> that will not ever happen anymore, but still).
>
> The cost for a poor maintenance is low compared to the benefit, IMHO.
>
> For instance, it is boring to run massive lint:
>
>  1. because “guix lint” does not support the option --manifest
>  2. because “guix lint” reports some false-positive messages

Yeah, my suggestion was mostly about trying to address aspects of point
2.


live well,
  vagrant

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