Re: Some (I believe) spurious warnings in Lintian for e2fsprogs

[Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 11:59:37AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> Per the Lintain's user's manual, I'd like to ask your opinion on these
> three Lintian warnings before I override them:
> 
> W: libuuid1: maintainer-script-needs-depends-on-adduser postinst
> N:
> N:   This script calls adduser, but the package does not depend or
> N:   pre-depend on the adduser package.
> N:
> 
> I'm not actually calling the adduser program.  Instead the script is
> checking for the adduser configuration file and respecting it, per a
> user request that e2fsprogs respect the adduser configuration, but
> because e2fsprogs is an essential package, I didn't want to actually
> depend on the adduser package.  The shell script fragment in question
> which seems to be trigger lintian is:
> 
> ADDUSERCONF='/etc/adduser.conf'
[...]
> 
> I suspect lintian is simply searching for the string "adduser" to
> trigger the lintian warning.

Hmm, the test currently searches for '\badduser\b', I think the second
\b could be replaced by something more strict, like \s (since I can't
think of any usage of adduser without any options).

> W: e2fsprogs source: debian-rules-calls-debhelper-in-odd-order dh_gencontrol (line 519)
> N:
> N:   One of the targets in the debian/rules file for this package calls
> N:   debhelper programs in an odd order. Normally, dh_makeshlibs should be
> N:   called before dh_shlibdeps or dh_installdeb, dh_shlibdeps should be
> N:   called before dh_gencontrol, and all should be called before
> N:   dh_builddeb. Calling them in the wrong order may cause incorrect or
> N:   missing package files and metadata.
> N:
> 
> Things are getting called out of order here because of the need to
> create udeb files.  And the rules file is complicated enough that
> keeping the udeb files close together seems to much easier to
> understand and in the long run make the rules file as maintainable as
> possible given the complexity of the e2fsprogs package.
> 
> I'm not sure there's much that can be done here, other than my just
> overriding the lintian warning for this package.

Hmm, using debhelper's udeb support would really simplify the rules
file and most likely avoid the need to do this. Any reason not to?

Gruesse,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/