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Re: Use lintian to catch erroneous NMU



On Tuesday 07 January 2003 01:38, Wesley W. Terpstra wrote:
> I believe that the way an NMU upload is determined is error-prone.
>
> For example:
> 	Maintainer: Wesley W. Terpstra <terpstra@debian.org>
> 	Changed-By: Wesley W. Terpstra (Debian) <terpstra@debian.org>
> will result in a NMU upload.
>
> I understand that the strings do not compare to equality and that the gpg
> key encodes the personal name. I also agree that I should have noticed this
> before dupload. However, this error is (at least for me) a common one since
> I build my .debs from either work/home in various chroots.
>
> 1. lintian
> 	Add a lintian warning like:
> 	W: Non-maintainer uploaded package
>

lintian's job in life (and linda's too) is to:

a) point out policy issues
b) help point out packaging bugs
c) help prevent packager problems

I see no reason why a NMU should be flagged.  Now perhaps a I: this is a NMU 
makes sense.  But not so sure about a warning.

> 	I believe this would help developers notice their mistake.
>
> 	I also think that this SHOULD be a warning. An NMU'd package is
> 	quite possibly not as high quality since the non-maintainer is
> 	likely not conversant with all the issues of the package.
>

but many NMUs are done to IMPROVE the quality of a package.

> 	Add a lintian error like:
> 	E: Non-maintainer uploaded package with identical email address
>
> 	I believe this would help developers notice their mistake.
> 	I can not think of any case where this is NOT an error.
>
> 	Add a lintian error like:
> 	E: Non-maintainer uploaded package with similar personal name
>

these two however make sense.

> 2. the upload system
> 	Simply compare only the email address fields.
> 	gpg can still find keys with only the email address...
>
> I am not so sure about the lintian warning. Would a warning on every NMU
> wreck any of the automated tools? I believe that at least the philosophy is
> correct.
>

no automation uses lintian/linda yet in any real way.

There is a debian-lint mailing list to discuss these ideas and you should also 
probably file a bug after a little more talk has occurred.



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