Re: On the quest for automated QA checks
Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> writes:
> * for instance deprecated debhelper programs should generate a big fat
> warning and, while they don't do that, detecting them.
Lintian should catch this already, although we may not have the most
recent ones. If you know which are missing, please file a wishlist
lintian bug.
> * seeing if the rules file has the maintainer overriding, say, CFLAGS
> and LDFLAGS.
This is hard to analyze properly. The package should not be relying on
environment variables set by dpkg-buildpackage, since then debian/rules
build doesn't work.
> * seeing if a given package providing a library has the -dev package
> containing the soname in the name of the package (e.g., libfoo0-dev).
This is sometimes the right thing to do, sometimes not.
> * seeing if the package would benefit from LDFLAGS like --as-needed or
> -z,defs in the linking stages.
IMO, --as-needed is never a good idea.
It's fairly hard to check except by analyzing a build log whether the
package is using -z,defs, and it can be very hard to add that sort of
flag to the upstream build system.
> * seeing if the package properly doesn't have unnecessary dependencies.
Really, really hard to check in an automated way.
> * seeing if a -dev package has libc6-dev as one of its dependencies (it
> seems that the current lintian from unstable doesn't catch this).
It should; please file a bug against lintian.
> * seeing if the long description passes a spell checker test (running
> ispell or whatever).
Lots and lots of false positives for this. I don't think it's worth it.
> * seeing if the files in the debian directory have trailing whitespaces.
Eh, really? I've never understood why people care about this. That
being said, there's already a wishlist bug against Lintian to check for
this at the --pedantic level.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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