Otto Kekäläinen:
Hi! Currently Lintian requires a (source or binary) package to check[1]. However, many of the Lintian source package checks (e.g. spelling of debian/changelog entries) don't strictly depend on anything being built. Is anyone aware of a way to run lintian directly on a debian/ directory contents as-is without doing a source build first? I am exploring this in order to get my text editor to nag about findings immediately without separate source build steps. Otto [1] https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/lintian/lintian.1.en.html
Paul already answered the lintian part, so I will skip that. But I also wanted to suggest looking into integrated spell-checking in your editor if possible. Having integrated spell-check will enable a much faster feedback loop. As an example, if you are using a Jetbrains IDE (such as CLion or PyCharm Community Edition), then I added a plugin (`Debian Packaging Support`), which among other has spell-checking of d/changelog + the description fields inside d/control.
Alternatively, for spell-checks, I think someone once wrote a "spellintian" that could use lintian's dataset for spell checking without running the full lintian program. Not sure what became of it.
Best regards, Niels