DRAFT: Bits from the Lintian maintainers
[ This is a draft of a post I'd like to send to debian-devel-announce.
Take a look and let me know if anything is wrong or missing. Thanks! ]
Current Status
==============
Since the lenny freeze began, we've been working on incorporating major
changes in preparation for squeeze, including (as previously announced)
merging the Google Summer of Code work done by Jordà Polo for
finer-grained tag classification. Recently, we've been maintaining a
schedule of a release each Saturday. The goal is to have as good of a
Lintian as possible in preparation for the beginning of active development
for squeeze. Once the release freeze is over, lots of maintainers will be
uploading new versions of their packages, which is a great opportunity to
clean up those hidden or niggling packaging issues that weren't
appropriate for freeze uploads.
Hopefully, we'll be able to keep up with a weekly release cycle until the
release. After the release, my expectation is that we'll drop down to a
release every two weeks as long as the development speed warrants it, to
give Lintian time to migrate into testing.
Pedantic Support
================
Lintian 2.2.0 adds support for pedantic tags, contributed by Raphael
Geissert. This is a new level of tag severity below the existing info
level, corresponding to "problems" that would never warrant a bug report
and which may be a matter of opinion or very likely to be inaccurate.
This new tag level will let us implement some picky checks that have been
frequently requested, but which some maintainers may disagree with.
It's up to each maintainer whether to use --pedantic at all. It's Lintian
at its pickiest. The tags won't be in the default lintian.debian.org view
(right now, they're not there at all, but we may add a view of them). If
you do use --pedantic, please don't worry too much about making your
package pedantic-clean unless the tags really seem like a good idea.
Also, as noted in the man page, adding overrides for pedantic tags is
probably not worth the effort. You should look over the report and apply
human judgement.
I expect this mode to be useful for sponsors, who want to be alerted to
possible issues but can decide for themselves which ones to mention.
New lintian.debian.org Tag View
===============================
Lintian 2.2.0 also adds a new tag view on lintian.debian.org that's sorted
by tag severity and certainty. This view is at:
http://lintian.debian.org/tags-severity.html
This provides another view on possible archive-wide problems. It will
also provide Lintian contributors with a useful summary of the current
severity and certainty of existing tags, which will help in finding and
fixing tags that don't have the correct severity or certainty. (For
example, tags that are severity: certain but frequently overridden may
either not be certain or may have problems thst should be fixed.)
Upcoming Work
=============
I've been working on Lintian's internal architecture, providing more
infrastructure so that the check scripts themselves are simpler, moving
Lintian's internal Perl libraries to a better naming scheme, and adding
internal POD documentation. Lintian 2.2.1 eliminated two of the old
modules, and I hope to move several more in the near future, as well as
improving the internal architecture for checking dependency fields.
Raphael Geissert has been working on improved infrastructure for source
package checks, generating more laboratory information to allow some
requested checks to be implemented. The start of that work will hopefully
be merged in the next release.
Helping Out
===========
More hands are always welcome! Lintian is a nice project to work on when
one only has an hour or two, since a lot of the requested checks don't
require very much code. Work on the test suite is also much appreciated
and doesn't require a large time investment. If you want to help out,
take a look at the wiki page at:
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Lintian
We're also looking for someone who would like to tackle converting the
Lintian manual in Docbook instead of DebianDoc-SGML and working on
updates. There's quite a bit about Lintian that isn't currently
documented. If you're interested, let us know.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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