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Re: how to get people to run lintian on their packages



On Thu, 7 Jul 2011 23:05:03 +0200, Benoît Knecht wrote:
Hi Paul,

Paul Wise wrote:
It is rare to see an RFS that says "The package appears to be lintian
clean." and the package (especially binary ones) actually be lintian
clean. If we were to change the RFS template, what could we change it
to in order to encourage accuracy and for people to actually use
lintian and fix any issues found.

I think three things are currently unclear:

  - lintian should be run on the .changes file before uploading a
    package to mentors, in order to check both the source and binary
package (I know I used to run it on the .dsc file without realizing
    it wasn't checking the binary package).

When I tryed to use lintian, the first time, I read the manual page and it was not too clear. Looking for examples, you can found this, in the lintian manual (http://lintian.debian.org/manual/ch2.html)

$ lintian -i libc5_5.4.38-1.deb <- lintian over the deb file. In the html file do not mention the .changes file

Probably the info about lintian should be a little bit more clear for newbie users. YES, probably you are the master of the lintian and for you is clear, but not for people doing their first package.

One idea about how to check the packages is add the check in the the .dupload.conf file.

Please, don't kill me about my comments. Thanks.

Regards,

kix.

  - The -I and --pedantic options should always be used.

  - And always use the latest version from unstable.

Would writing something like "Paste the output of lintian -I --pedantic your_package.changes" instead of filling that line automatically in the
template be a better option? I would imagine people would then try to
fix any issues before blindly sending the message to mentors.

Cheers,

--
Benoît Knecht

--
||// //\\// Rodolfo "kix" Garcia
||\\// //\\ http://www.kix.es/


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