Bug#356307: lintian: wrong error messages for broken symlinks

[Michael Spang <mspang@twcny.rr.com>]

Package: lintian
Version: 1.23.15
Severity: normal

The following lintian error occured during the testing of a package I
am preparing:

E: firefox-greasemonkey: symlink-should-be-absolute usr/lib/firefox/extensions/{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781} ../../../../share/mozilla-extensions/greasemonkey

And, after making it absolute:

E: firefox-greasemonkey: symlink-should-be-relative usr/lib/firefox/extensions/{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781} /usr/share/mozilla-extensions/greasemonkey

The first of these is obviously wrong. After further testing I realized that
the symlink ascended one too many levels and was broken. Lintian erronously
reported that a broken relative symlink (which should be relative) should be
made absolute. It might be wise to add a broken symlink error or warning.

Thanks!
Michael Spang

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.16-rc5-git3
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils             2.16.1cvs20060117-1 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii  diffstat             1.41-1              produces graph of changes introduc
ii  dpkg-dev             1.13.16             package building tools for Debian
ii  file                 4.15-2              Determines file type using "magic"
ii  gettext              0.14.5-2            GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  intltool-debian      0.34.1+20050828     Help i18n of RFC822 compliant conf
ii  libparse-debianchang 1.0-1               parse Debian changelogs and output
ii  man-db               2.4.3-3             The on-line manual pager
ii  perl [libdigest-md5- 5.8.8-2             Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

lintian recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information