over 30000 bugs in our archive (!)
I've written a few more lintian checker scripts and ran it over the
current unstable distribution (archive timestamp Fri, Feb 6). The report
lists:
Maintainers: 248
Source pkgs: 1095
Binary pkgs: 1510
Warnings: 12786
Errors: 32268 (!)
Ok, ok, before this starts a flame war please let me comment on how the
numbers have been assembled: Lintian runs very simple checks over the
packages and reports each little `inconsistency' as error. (For example,
if a large package like the `picon' packages fail with the md5sums file,
this produces several thousands of errors, one for each file. But such a
bug can be fixed within seconds by recompiling the package...)
The following checks are currently included in lintian: conffiles,
copyright-file, description, files, manpages, md5sums, shared-libs,
standards-version.
What should I do with the report now? Last time I asked, I was told that I
should post the report to debian-devel. But since the report is nearly
300k I wanted to ask again, before I make lots of people angry :-)
I see the following options:
a. post the report to debian-devel (that will be a 300k mail!)
(Note, that the report is already `compressed': repeating
messages for a single package have been dropped. I don't think the
report can be `compressed' more than that without loosing
information. It would be possible to gzip+uuencode this file, but
then I guess most maintainers wouldn't decode it...)
b. contact each maintainer directly with only the relevant data
(that will be 250 short mails--I could handle that)
c. file bug reports (about 1000 bug reports!!)
Notes:
1. I already posted a copyright-file report to debian-devel but got
the impression that noone really cared about it.
2. The first lintian deb package will be released soon. With that,
everyone can check her own packages at home. (But if noone files bug
reports, I guess most maintainers will not install lintian...)
3. It should be very easy to fix the bugs reported by lintian. I think we
should treat packages as `orphaned' (i.e., not actively maintained) if
these simple bugs are not fixed within a reasonable amount of time (say 4
weeks). With that, Debian 2.0 will be `Lintian approved' ;-)
Any comments are appreciated!
Thanks,
Chris
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
/ o \__ schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
! ___; schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
\ /
\\\______/ ! PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
\ / http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/
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"DIE ENTE BLEIBT DRAUSSEN!"
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