Bug#486682: lintian: warn if wildcards in .install could let a SONAME bump go unnoticed?

[Adeodato Simó <dato@net.com.org.es>]

Package: lintian
Version: 1.24.1
Severity: wishlist

Hello,

this is an idea I had the other day, and while I can see some problems
with it, I thought I'd submit it anyway, to see if a bit of chit-chat
could make it morph into something useful, or just clearly show it's not
a good idea.

The thing is that several times I've noticed already that packages
inadvertently ship a new SONAME of a library without changing the
package name, because the wildcard in the .install file for the package
does not restrict the files to a particular SONAME, as in:

  usr/lib/libfoo.so.*

So the idea would be to warn on the presence of such greedy wildcards,
iff a sensible scheme for detecting them can be devised.

Thoughts?

-- 
Adeodato Simó                                     dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer                                  adeodato at debian.org
 
               Listening to: Mª Dolores Pradera - El rosario de mi madre