[DRAFT] Upcoming changes in lintian & some bits
[to be sent after 2.5.0 is uploaded to experimental]
Overrides breakage
==================
During the development of Lintian 2.5.0 it was decided to finally use a
consistent way to report file names in tags. Additionally, the embedded-
lib* tags have all been merged into embedded-library.
It is because of these reasons that many overrides are expected to break.
We recognise this change might cause some noise, but we are convinced the
advantage outweighs the side-effect.
We expect auto rejections to be disabled for the affected, non-fatal, tags
for a while to give a grace period of time for this transition.
Lintian 2.4.0, currently in experimental, has a list of tags we expect to be
used for auto rejections after the grace period of time. --ftp-master-
rejects can be used to only check for those tags.
Current status
==============
Thanks to Niels Thykier joining the team, Lintian 2.5.0 features a number of
new checks and many bug fixes. Lintian 2.5.0 closed 51 bug reports.
Continuing with the tradition of comparing the number of tags of Lintian
between Debian releases: Debian etch's Lintian shipped with 555 tags,
lenny's with 712 tags, and squeeze's with 878. Lintian 2.5.0 already has
890, in spite of the consolidation of many tags.
Upcoming work
=============
Niels Thykier has been working on infrastructure changes that are going to
be included in upcoming releases. The changes include cleanup and code
refactoring.
A lot of work is still needed to complete some olds goals, start working on
a major infrastructure rewrite, and finally get to work on goals discussed
during Debconf 10, in New York City.
Helping Out (blatantly copied from previous bits emails)
===========
More hands are always welcome! Lintian is a nice project to work on when
one only has an hour or two, since a lot of the requested checks don't
require very much code. Work on the test suite is also much appreciated
and doesn't require a large time investment. If you want to help out,
take a look at the wiki page at:
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Lintian
We're also looking for someone who would like to work on updating the
Lintian manual. There's quite a bit about Lintian that isn't currently
documented. If you're interested, let us know.
If you have any ideas for new tests that would be helpful to you, please
do submit them as wishlist bugs against the lintian package. It's nice to
have a large collection of ideas known to be useful to someone to pick
>From when one has a few hours to work on Lintian.
--
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net
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