Bug#387166: lintian: Failed to identify Priorities error: Policy 2.5.
severity 387166 wishlist
retitle 387166 [checks/fields] diagnose priority inversion within a source package
thanks
Neil Williams <linux@codehelp.co.uk> writes:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.24
> Severity: important
A missing check in lintian is not an important bug in the lintian package
itself. lintian does not promise to find all RC bugs in packages, and in
fact there are many that it structurally *cannot* find and will never be
able to find because it only looks at packages at (at most) the source
package granularity. A request for a new check is a wishlist bug.
> A recent upload of QOF included two new packages. The main library is
> dependent on at least one of these new packages being installed and is
> Priority: optional. However, I inadvertently put the two new packages as
> Priority: extra and lintian did NOT complain. When the upload was made,
> the two new binaries raised a Debcheck error:
Right, debcheck does cross-package checks that lintian can't perform;
that's one of the reasons why debcheck is a good supplemental system to
lintian.
In this particular case, it's at least possible for lintian to have found
your bug, since you're talking about multiple packages built from the same
source package with interdependencies and incorrect relative priorities.
Analysis of the source package control field could catch this. I'm not
sure how high of a priority doing that would be, but it may be relatively
straightforward.
It's not possible for lintian to catch the *general* instance of this
problem, though, where the package depended on comes from another source
package.
> I have since built and my sponsor has uploaded 0.7.1-2 which corrects
> the settings in the debian/control file for qof before the Debcheck
> becomes an RC bug.
While priority inversion is a policy violation, it has not historically
been an RC bug. Not all policy violations are RC.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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