On Thu, 7 Jul 2011, Paul Wise wrote:
In addition, there is one derivative that I know of that has current and public lintian web pages, but I guess that one is well known by lintian maintainers since I guess it is run by Russ. It is a shame that lintian pages aren't more widespread within our derivatives. I guess some use it on the packages during their build process but I wonder how we could encourage them to use it more, anyone have any thoughts? http://lintian.debathena.org/
We are the only one? I'm proud :-) We set that up about a year ago because why not, but in practice, we've more been using Lintian output from the package build process (debuild/sbuild) than the page, and making sure there are no regressions and no unexpected warnings on new packages.
In terms of making Lintian useful for derivatives, I think the biggest feature we'd like is having a way to suppress Lintian checks during the build process for an entire origin of packages (defined somehow...). For instance, all our packages have Maintainer: debathena@mit.edu, which is a list, and so just about everything triggers both source-nmu-has-incorrect-version-number and changelog-should-mention-nmu. We also put everything in debathena/* sections of our apt repository, triggering unknown-section everywhere. It feels pretty wrong to put override files in every single package, and even that doesn't suppress the warning entirely, just mention it's overridden.
The part I'm not positive about is how to identify "our" packages. It happens that we use a single maintainer, so that would work in our use case, but would that be upstreamable?
Alternatively, should certain checks like NMU cleanliness be disabled on non-official Debian packages? Again, I'm not sure how to identify which is which... it would be nicest if you could apt-get source and debuild on a machine that wasn't prepared in any special way, but it's not onerous for us to require that people hacking on our packages have something like a debathena-lintian-config package installed.
-- Geoffrey Thomas SIPB Debathena team debathena@mit.edu