Bug#444355: lintian: Bogus diagnostics for hard-linked files

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> writes:

> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.34
> Severity: normal

> The ion3-doc package contains two files with two names (hard-links)
> each:
>     /usr/share/doc/ion3-doc/ionconf/{ionconf,index}.html
>     /usr/share/doc/ion3-doc/ionconf/{ionnotes,index}.html

> In a tarball, the second and subsequent names for a file are
> represented by reference to the first, rather like symbolic links.
> lintian doesn't process these references properly, and so produces the
> diagnostics:

> E: doc-base-file-references-missing-file
> W: zero-byte-file-in-doc-directory

> There may well be other checks that have the same problem.

I've fixed both of these for the next release.  They were two very
different problems (the first because the doc-base code chases links and
wasn't doing it properly for hard links, and the second because tar
reports hard links as empty).  lintian in general does try to handle hard
links, so I don't think there are any general structural problems.  If you
run into any other mistaken warnings, please do submit additional bugs.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>