Bug#470912: lintian: Please activate "no-upstream-changelog"
gregor herrmann <gregor+debian@comodo.priv.at> writes:
> About the only thing why I still run linda after lintian is the
> warning about a missing upstream changelog which is quite helpful in
> various situations (new changelog, missed in previous build, ...).
>
> I wanted to suggest to add this functionality to lintian, just to
> find out that it's already in checks/changelog-file{,.desc} but it's
> commented out in the test:
>
> # This tag is disabled for now since a lot of packages fail this
> # aspect of policy and I want to clarify policy WRT multi-binary
> # packages first.
> #tag "no-upstream-changelog", "";
>
> My suggestion would be to enable the check but set the Type to info
> in changelog-file.desc until the open question is resolved. That way
> it could still help interested maintainers without implying a policy
> violation.
I don't want to enable it as-is, since it's normal to not include the
upstream changelog in every separate binary package (and I think that's
legitimate; it can be a significant waste of space for packages that are
broken out into a lot of separate library packages, for instance, and have
large changelogs).
It may make sense to enable at the info level when only one binary package
is built from a given source package, but lintian has no way of knowing
that's the case while doing binary package checks.
I don't see a good way to enable this tag that wouldn't produce tons and
tons of false positives, more than I'd be comfortable with even at the
info level. All the good ideas that I can come up with (such as warning
if upstream contains a non-empty NEWS or ChangeLog or CHANGES file that
isn't being installed) require knowledge of the source package and the
binary package at the same time, which structurally lintian doesn't have.
I may be missing some neat way of handling it, though....
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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