Bug#398898: lintian: zero-byte-file-in-doc-directory bogus complain on files in examples
Shachar Shemesh <shachar@debian.org> writes:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.25
> Severity: normal
> Rsyncrypto is a package that performs rsync friendly encryption. The
> package comes bundled with a "tests" directory, that gets installed into
> /usr/share/doc/rsyncrypto/examples/tests. This directory contains known
> plain texts, cipher texts and keys so that regression testing and
> comparisons can be run.
> Some of the files in said directory are records of when the internal
> decision function decided to perform an IV reset. For some of the
> regression testing files (reg1 and reg2), this file is empty.
> When running version 0.18-1 (the version that introduced the tests
> direcotry under examples) through lintian, I get the complaint:
> O: rsyncrypto: zero-byte-file-in-doc-directory
> usr/share/doc/rsyncrypto/examples/tests/reg1.rot
> O: rsyncrypto: zero-byte-file-in-doc-directory
> usr/share/doc/rsyncrypto/examples/tests/reg2.rot
> (as you can see, I did an override). I believe that the override is
> unnecessary, and the files under /usr/share/doc/*/examples should not be
> checked for non-emptyness.
I'm tentatively happy for this to be something that you override, as it
would surprise me if there are many cases of this in the archive where a
zero-byte file is a legitimate example. The purpose of this warning is
primarily to catch packaging mistakes where someone installs upstream
files that are actually empty, a very common mistake and one that does
also happen in the examples directory (although far less common than
installing a zero-length README file or the like).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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