Re: Notes from the lintian BOF
Raphael Geissert <geissert@debian.org> writes:
> I took some notes from the lintian BOF. I tried to include everything
> that was discussed, but I'm sure I missed some things. I tried to omit
> my opinion and add a marker when I did include it.
> I hope they are useful and that we can continue discussing some of the
> ideas.
> * Lintian "extras" (language/team/etc-specific checks)
> * meta-package: some people think it's a good idea - but:
> * notify when you want lintian-$LANG
> * OR: get everything in the core package, warn when a dep is missing but it
> might be worth installing it
> * how to detect those cases?
Expanding a bit, lintian would become a metapackage that depends on
lintian-core and all the lintian-foo packages, but we'd need to find some
way of warning if a lintian-foo package would be useful but isn't
installed.
For cases where the check should be written in another language than Perl,
the collection script should be written in that language and the check
still written in Perl, so that the collection script gathers the data
required and then the check script in Perl does the analysis.
> * Vendor-based checks exclusion
> * not lintianrc-based: should be possible to use the same installation to
> check for different distros
> * really vendor-based: ubuntu, emdebian, $COMPANY
> * not just exclude, also include more
> * use case: different suite names - expected: different profiles without
> code changes
We think we'll want to store a field with the check if that check should
only trigger in certain profiles, and then we can handle a lot of the
cases by just suppressing the tag if none of its profiles are active, but
we'll probably want in some places to not bother running a check if a
profile isn't active.
This will become a maintenance burden if we have too many profiles with
too much branching.
> * CLI-based "profiles:"
> * add wrappers?
> * include the vendor in the Tag?
> * possible integration with checks/*->.pms? ubuntu_check_foo
> * or include $PATH-based?
> * Scope of lintian checks? cppcheck and other utils
> * Improve documentation of lintianrc
> * Wiki.d.o tags review
> * advertise it
We also need a better way of updating it. I did the process outlined in
the wiki for updating the database while I was at DebConf, and I don't
think we'll want to do that. It's very tedious since it involves copying
and pasting a *huge* pile of generated output. I think we need some sort
of back door into the wiki to do the updates more easily.
> * Tag translations:
> * Wiki-based? lintian could point to the translation on the wiki
> * Rather ugly -- Raphael
> * At least the description should be able to be translated
> * Not sure if it's worth translating the tag name, could also lead to
> confusion -- Raphael
If someone gets a chance, could you put these notes (from Raphael and my
additions) up on the Teams/Lintian wiki page so that we don't lose this
discussion?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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