Re: GSoC status: classification, output format and more

[Jordà Polo <jorda@ettin.org>]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 09:13:25PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> In practice, there are a few checks that take up a *lot* of time (man page
> processing, for example), and most checks are fairly fast once you have
> all the data collected anyway.  Currently, the split between checks/*
> scripts is a bit arbitrary and is mostly based on convenience and what
> someone was thinking when they wrote the checks.
> 
> [...]
> 
> I think moving the most time-consuming checks into separate checks scripts
> is potentially a very good idea, since then we can selectively exclude
> particular check scripts, or even classify check scripts based on how
> heavy they are and provide options to only run quick checks.

Just ran lintian through the whole lenny archive to get some numbers.
Since the machine was rather old and didn't have enough HD space, it
only checked source packages... It isn't necessarily representative, but
you can get an idea.

Collections are certainly more time consuming, but some checks take
quite a lot of time too (e.g. po-debconf, specially if you take into
account that only a limited number of packages run it from beginning to
end).

Collections:

  debfiles            2058.083
  source-control-file 1909.661
  diffstat            1508.258
  override-file       1330.830
                      6806.83

Checks:

  po-debconf           954.981
  fields               776.158
  cruft                425.962
  standards-version    277.267
  control-file         231.320
  patch-systems        192.197
  debhelper             60.784
  rules                 51.172
  version-substvars     19.151
  watch-file            16.439
  nmu                   16.434
  debconf                8.708
                      3030.58