Re: Bits from the Lintian maintainers
Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com> writes:
> It would be really, really great if someone were to outline how to
> add/remove tests from lintian's list of tests. If one could run 'pools'
> of tests while using linitian's reporting infrastructure and in-depth
> debian knowledge that would be a boon for all those who want to do QA on
> packages who are downstream from debian - and there is a huge number of
> people there.
Indeed. This was one of those things that we were discussing just
recently: we want to allow packaging teams to write their own Lintian
checks and tell Lintian to run them in addition to (or instead of) the
ones that Lintian already runs so that special conventions for that
packaging team can be checked. There are similar use cases for local
Debian archives and derivative distributions.
Right now, the interface internally in Lintian between the infrastructure
and the checks is very much in flux due to the reorganization that Raphael
and I are doing. See our recent long threads for more details. I suspect
that within a few months, things will be somewhat more stable.
However, there are certainly some things that won't be changing (at least
much) and which we could start documenting now, such as the format of
*.desc files and the basic mechanism of getting data from the laboratory
and issuing tags.
> I am willing to help with this - I have dived into the codebase already
> - but lintian is big and the code calls lots of modules so it takes time
> to document. If the lintian team might somehow prioritize that, or even
> be willing to answer questions, that would be a huge win I believe.
I'm certainly happy to answer questions. For my own work on Lintian, I'm
probably going to be prioritizing the code infrastructure work over the
documentation for a little while since otherwise some of the documentation
would need to be written twice.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: