Re: lintian for Emdebian

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:

> Now I'm quite familiar with Perl (all the emdebian build tools are in
> Perl), I could come up with compatible Perl modules along the lines of
> Lintian::binaries::Emdebian or Lintian::Cross but I want to be able to
> fold these checks into the standard lintian checks so that I don't just
> create a fork that will lag behind lintian and eventually be too
> incompatible to maintain. (We did that with dpkg-dev and dpkg-cross and
> it took nearly 10 years to get our changes back into dpkg-dev.)
>
> So I'm looking for ideas. I want to be able to selectively disable
> checks *within* lintian packages - e.g. the RPATH issue - whilst
> retaining the other checks in that package, modifying the importance of
> some and adding new ones. Simply disabling the entire set of checks is
> not worthwhile - I'd have to maintain 90% of the original check file as
> a fork.

My recommendation is to try to tackle this on two fronts:

* For the new checks specific to emdebian, add new check files.  You can
  do this in a completely separate package and just depend on lintian.
  Lintian when run will pick up any files in /usr/share/lintian/checks, so
  you can just drop more checks and *.desc files in there.  You can have
  those checks do nothing if they detect they're not running in the
  emdebian mode somehow.

* For the Lintian checks that are wrong for emdebian, I would just add a
  global override file for emdebian.  If you need additional Lintian
  support for override files that are more overridey than normal
  (suppressing tags even with --show-overrides, for example) or are
  selectively loaded, we can try to work out generic changes to the driver
  scripts for this.

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