Bug#441636: Warn if this is likely not meant

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> writes:

> It might be a good idea to warn when lintian is run on something else
> than a changes files, but a changes file is present in the same
> directory (and contains the file that was used).  That would not get in
> the way of using lintian on other files, but it would prevent accidents.
> Something like:
>
> Warning: you are calling lintian on file.dsc, which also appears in
> file.changes.  Be aware that this doesn't check other parts of the
> changes file.  If you intended to check the result of a package build,
> call lintian on the changes file instead.  If you do intend to call
> lintian on this file, you can suppress this warning with the
> --ignore-changes option.

We'd have to strip out the file name, readdir the directory, and scan for
the changes file since the filename of the changes file is not derivable
from the .dsc file (it includes the architecture).  I'm not enthused about
doing this.  I think this is the sort of one-time error that isn't worth
putting a lot of effort into warning about.  It's based on a fundamental
misunderstanding of the files involved in the Debian build process and is
the sort of thing that, once you learn about it, it's obvious in the
future.

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