Bug#849752: both issues would best be resolved by dpkg-source

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

Control: clone -1 -2
Control: reassign -1 dpkg-dev
Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: retitle -2 Error out when input files do not exist

Sorry to quote myself:

On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 2:23 PM Felix Lechner
<felix.lechner@lease-up.com> wrote:
>
> I will try to improve the error message, which is not great.

The error message comes from dpkg-source in this part of Lintian:

    https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/blob/master/collection/unpacked#L78-99

The strange bit about copying a file onto itself appears only when
'--no-check' is used:

    $ dpkg-source --no-check -x dijitso_2019.1.0-2.dsc unpacked/
    dpkg-source: info: extracting dijitso in unpacked
    cp: cannot stat './dijitso_2019.1.0.orig.tar.gz': No such file or directory
    dpkg-source: error: cp ./dijitso_2019.1.0.orig.tar.gz to
./dijitso_2019.1.0.orig.tar.gz subprocess returned exit status 1

It's probably easier to improve the message in dpkg-source. For
example, it would be helpful to state that
'./dijitso_2019.1.0.orig.tar.gz' is a constituent of
dijitso_2019.1.0-2.dsc but could not be located. The second 'cp'
message is also not meaningful. Reassigning this bug.

I cloned the bug for Lintian. Perhaps Lintian should also error out
when files destined for the pool do not exist. Unfortunately, I have
not yet located that part of our code.

>  Would a command line option for Lintian like '--also-look-for-files-in=PATH' work for you instead?

For source packages, Lintian would pass the option to dpkg-source. It
would have to be implemented there.

Kind regards,
Felix Lechner