Visualizing the evolution of Lintian tags

[Jordà Polo <jorda@ettin.org>]

I finally managed to generate graphs to visualize the evolution of
Lintian tags. This has been in my TODO for a long time: I think I
already mentioned it last year during GSoC.

The code is actually pretty straightforward. The current, experimental
version works without Lintian: it consists of a simple Perl script
(which somehow resembles reporting/html_reports) to read lintian.log
files and store statistics into data files. A Makefile is then used to
invoke gnuplot and generate the graphs.

I have been running it for the last few days, and the first graphs are
already available, including per-tag[1] (e.g.
unstripped-binary-or-object[2]) and global statistics[3]. Note that it
is still a work in progress, and some graphs may not be entirely
accurate compared to the Lintian Tags page[4].

I think it would be a good idea to display the graphs at lintian.d.o,
but I'm not sure how: integrating it into lintian/reporting, or running
it as an external service (e.g. cron job on alioth.d.o).

Any thoughts?

 1. http://people.alioth.debian.org/~jorda-guest/lintian/graph/tags/
 2. http://people.alioth.debian.org/~jorda-guest/lintian/graph/tags/unstripped-binary-or-object.svg
 3. http://people.alioth.debian.org/~jorda-guest/lintian/graph/stats.svg
 4. http://lintian.debian.org/tags.html