Bug#942493: lintian: Complain of too long header fields

[Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com>]

Hi,

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 2:57 PM Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > 1/ emit a warning when a field is larger than say 16K (somehow to force
> >    the maintainer to think twice whether's he's doing something
> >    reasonable)
> >
> > 2/ emit an error when a field is larger than 200K (it breaks reprepro
> >    above 256K)

Lintian currently issues only a single tag---an error---for any field
value exceeding 5000 characters.

> > This should be applied to .deb headers and .dsc headers. (.changes headers
> > are less interesting as they are auto-generated without much control by
> > the maintainer, or are a simple copy of fields already present in other
> > files).

Lintian currently issue the tag for all files.

> this now triggers an error in systemd:
> E: systemd-tests-dbgsym: field-too-long 'Build-Ids' (8568 chars > 5000)
>
> Given that systemd-tests-dbgsym is an autogenerated package, there isn't
> really something that can be done to reduce the number of characters, or
> is there?

Unless there is a flag that indicates autobuilding, we could exempt
all packages ending in -dbgsym.

Alternatively, we could exempt the field Build-Ids. Or, we could
except Build-Ids only in dbgsym packages. Please let us know.

Kind regards,
Felix Lechner