[R-pkg-team] Bug#930369: dh-r: Please drop automated package-contains-documentation-outside-usr-share-doc Lintian override generation

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Chris,

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 03:43:33PM +0100, Chris Lamb wrote:
> In #930311, Niels Thykier mentions that he:
> 
> > noticed that the dh-r package by default creates an override for
> > package-contains-documentation-outside-usr-share-doc when the R
> > package puts documentation in usr/lib/R/site-library
> 
> To wit, https://sources.debian.org/src/dh-r/20190121/dh/R.pm/?hl=3#L268.
> 
> My retort was that "the idea of automatically-generated overrides
> simply makes me squirm" and so I added an exception to Lintian itself
> here:
> 
>   https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/commit/a16cd3a1c812c8894bddf9b920561eb0dd602d85

Thanks for this.
 
> Accordingly, please remove the automatic generation code. At the very
> least it will now result in annoying "unused override" warnings
> instead.
> 
> (As an aside, if a similar situation occurs in the future, please
> consider requesting the Lintian maintainers to make a general
> exception; it is surely poor software engineering practice to litter
> our entire archive when we can so easily fix it in one place.)

I fully agree.  As always this was a quick-n-dirty hack which survived
way longer than planed.  Since I somehow sticked to this hack it was
also done for

    font-in-non-font-package and font-outside-font-dir

as you can see in

    https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/dh-r/blob/master/dh/R.pm

in line 268 (you see I've just commited a fix for the doc issue).
Would you also add an exception for lintian to not warn about those
fonts coming with R packages (I'm fine if you leave it but make it
of level pedantic instead of info).

Kind regards and thanks a lot for maintaining lintian

     Andreas.

-- 
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