Re: Bug#929433: lintian: warn on suspicious usage of dpkg-architecture variables
Hi Graham,
On Sat, May 25, 2019 at 06:06:08PM +0200, Graham Inggs wrote:
> But if a maintainer were about to upload a new package, or introduced
> changes to an existing package, that used DEB_BUILD* or DEB_TARGET* instead
> of DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH, I suspect the usage is most likely incorrect.
Your suspicion may mislead you. A number of packages disable tests on
mips and mipsel, because its address space is so limited. This would be
a case where you would use DEB_BUILD_* as it is the address space of the
machine you are building on that is relevant here. For this reason
alone, I think "most likely incorrect" is incorrect.
> Here are a couple I was able to find quickly:
>
> https://salsa.debian.org/debichem-team/nwchem/commit/96a2bd29073d5f25c97fdf9ce0493857b31fcae0
> https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/r-bioc-rhdf5lib/commit/00bd8caa6689bf048d4f0f654993b0402a74cedb
Beyond confusing build and host, these confuse *_GNU_TYPE and
*_MULTIARCH. This used to be a relevant pattern indeed. We can turn it
into a codesearch query:
https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=lib%2F%5C%24%5B%7B%28%5DDEB_%28BUILD%7CHOST%29_GNU_TYPE
The corresponding apt-file query does not yield any results however,
which suggests that we've fixed all of them.
apt-file search -x lib/i686-linux-gnu
I'm not sure what glibc and perl-cross-debian do in the codesearch
result, but the other occurrences look like they're either old changelog
entries or should use *_MULTIARCH. So using DEB_*_GNU_TYPE in a path
directly below lib is something that could reasonably be flagged with
few false positives. And it's also a mistake that can go unnoticed for a
while, because it only matters on i386.
And again the fingers of two hands almost suffice to enumerate all
packages matching this pattern. Again I question whether the effort of
turning this into a lintian check is well spent.
Graham, can I ask you to actually send those patches before continuing
this lintian discussion? I don't think this is moving us forward. Let it
rest a few days and gain more experience with the matter please.
Helmut
Reply to: