Re: over 30000 bugs in our archive (!)

[dark@xs4all.nl (Richard Braakman)]

Charles Briscoe-Smith wrote:
> Christian Schwarz wrote:
> >Someone pointed out that I should make the lintian report available via
> >the web.  [...]
> 
> Thanks for making your lintian output available; I'm now going to fix
> the bugs!  A couple of questions and comments, though:
> 
> > E: gsn-curses: description-contains-invalid-control-statement
> 
> What does this mean?  I'd guess it has to do with the line in the
> extended description which starts with an elipsis (...)?

Correct.  From section 7.1 of the Packaging manual:

7.1 Types of formatting line in the extended description

[...]
     * Those containing a space, a full stop and some more characters.
       These are for future expansion. Do not use them.

> > E: zcode-support: file-missing-in-md5sums etc/menu/zcode-support
> > E: zcode-support: file-missing-in-md5sums etc/zcode-support/interpreters
> > E: zcode-support: file-missing-in-md5sums etc/zcode-support/interpreters
> > E: strn: file-missing-in-md5sums etc/news/strn/default_topic
> > E: strn: file-missing-in-md5sums etc/news/strn/hier_groups
> > E: strn: file-missing-in-md5sums etc/news/strn/hier_groups
> 
> These are deliberately left out of the md5sums file because they are
> conffiles.  dpkg already records md5sums for conffiles in the status
> file.  OTOH, if you can give me a reason why I should include them, I
> will.

I'll let Christian reply to this :)

> In fact, I'm not sure why you're checking for this anyway...  md5sums
> files are not yet Policy, are they?

Lintian does not complain about the absence of an md5sums file, but if
one exists it does check it for validity.  This is indeed not a policy
check but a bug check.  If the chapter-and-verse code had been operational 
yet then the md5sums errors would have been clearly marked as such :-)

> > E: strn: old-fsf-address
> 
> In the /usr/doc/*/copyright, I suppose?  In that file, I report what
> the copyrights and licences actually ARE.  I should not change them
> from what the author(s) wrote.  This should therefore be downgraded to
> a warning, or dropped altogether.

Hmm.  The FSF address is not part of the license, is it?  It just says
where to get a copy of the license if you don't have one.

Richard Braakman


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