Bug#504257: lintian: check for exit() or _exit() calls in shared libraries

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:

> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.0.0
> Severity: wishlist
>
> rpmlint added checks for exit() or _exit() calls in shared libraries:
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=450011
> http://rpmlint.zarb.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/changeset/1448
>
> I think this would be a useful addition to lintian.

I have some packages that would trigger this because the library uses
generic error handling routines that include functions that can call
exit() or _exit() but which are never called in practice.  Ideally, that
dead code would be stripped out of the shared library, but in practice,
this can be more painful to do than is worth it.

This sort of check suffers from the problem that there often isn't
anything the Debian maintainer can really do about it.  It's not the sort
of thing that warrants making modifications that upstream won't take,
usually (although it can in some situations).

I'm not opposed to adding it, but I think we should probably start with it
marked as experimental, and I'd expect a lot of false positives.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>