Bug#514951: [checks/binaries] check the output of strings for typos and mistakes
Raphael Geissert <atomo64@gmail.com> writes:
> Attached mbox contains patches adding a collection script to gather the
> output of the 'strings' command on the ELF binaries of a package, and
> spell checks its output. The collection script is also needed to
> implement the check for statically linking to zlib, within others.
You have to run strings -a if you're going to implement that, at which
point I think chances are pretty high that you're going to get false
positives from the spell checking part.
I don't really like trying to spell-check the strings inside binaries.
It's an interesting idea, but I think it's highly prone to false
positives. We're currently assuming that everything we're spell-checking
is English text. Binaries may contain different hyphenation or
non-English words that happen to match one of our corrections.
> The elf-index file was originally being generated so that it could be
> possible to iterate over the elf files without having to look for them
> in the file-info index. Maybe it should die if nobody finds a use for
> it.
This seems useful to me; I'll leave it in now in case we need it. I'm
applying the collection script, modified to add -a and exclude anything in
/usr/lib/debug. I've not applied the spelling check part.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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