Re: reporting/harness and stderr

["Adam D. Barratt" <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk>]

On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 15:53 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Adam D. Barratt" <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk> writes:
> 
> > As far as I can see, the following trivial patch to
> > reporting/{harness,html_reports} would achieve this. The only thing it
> > loses us is the ability to generate pages for tags which don't have any
> > information in the description file; I'm tempted to say that should be
> > folded in to read_tag_info() instead anyway, as such a tag is fairly
> > fundamentally broken.
> 
> What would be really cool is to take random stderr output and turn it into
> tags.  Otherwise, everything that reads the output file (which may be
> things outside of Lintian) has to cope with random non-tag output and do
> something with it.

I knew I shouldn't have asked... :-)

> If instead of just forking off lintian and redirecting its output,
> the harness ran lintian via IPC::Run or the moral equivalent, with both
> stdout and stderr returning to the harness, the harness could turn
> anything that didn't look like a tag or an N: line into an W:
> package-chokes-lintian tag before writing it out to the error log.

Is "it" there the generated tag, or the original error? In other words,
were you envisaging the tag being output to lintian.log and the spurious
output to a new error log, or simply the tag to an error log?

In either case, I'm presuming a 1:1 mapping between unexpected lines and
tags, so that a package producing lots of noise would in turn produce
lots of tags. For example, the earliest entry in my error log is:

        tar: ./dev/rd/0: Cannot mknod: Operation not permitted
        [... and a couple of dozen more ...]
        tar: ./dev/ptmx: Cannot mknod: Operation not permitted
        tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
        internal error.
        internal error: could not unpack package to desired level: No such file or directory

and would therefore produce approximately 30 extra tags.

Adam