Bug#733597: detect dev packages that don't depend on other dev packages
On 31/12/13 13:54, Jakub Wilk wrote:
> Control: retitle -1 [external] detect dev packages that don't depend on
> other dev packages
> Control: tags -1 + wontfix
>
> Thanks for the bug report.
>
> * Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>, 2013-12-30, 09:27:
>> It would be useful for lintian to scan the headers in a dev package
>> and see if they try to include any other headers that are not provided
>> (transitively) by Depends
>
> I'm afraid we can't do that without violating Lintian design constraints:
>
> “* deterministic replay-ability: Checks should not rely on the state of
> system caches or even the system time. These things makes it harder for
> others to reproduce (the absence of) tags.
I wasn't suggesting that it should rely on having such dependencies
installed on the system where lintian runs
A more logical approach would involve checking against the current
version of the dependencies in the distribution that the package is
targeted at.
> * same source analysis: Lintian checks packages in small isolated groups
> based on the source package. Requiring the presence of all the
> dependencies to provide the full results make it harder to run lintian
> (not to mention, it makes "deterministic replay-ability" a lot harder as
> well).”
Checking a package against something from the archive (e.g. dev headers)
is still a valid requirement, it just doesn't match with these lintian
objectives.
However, maybe lintian could have some optional mode for enabling
non-deterministic checks? Anybody submitting a non-deterministic check
to lintian would mark it as such and anybody looking at lintian output
should see an indication of which failures are based on some
non-deterministic check.
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