Bug#563984: Detect obsolete versioned build dependencies
Moritz Muehlenhoff <jmm@debian.org> writes:
> I would like to suggest a lintian test, which checks if any
> versioned build dependencies exist where the versions are
> lower than the version in oldstable.
> While this is technically not a problem, it's cruft which
> lintian could detect.
The difficulty is that Lintian has no idea what packages are available in
oldstable. That requires archive-wide knowledge, which Lintian by and
large doesn't have, except for some specific bits of information that we
pull and update only during releases.
One of Lintian's design goals is to be self-contained, in that if the same
version of Lintian is run on the same version of the package, you will
always get the same tags. This also ensures that Lintian can be run
off-line. I think to do this we'd have to include essentially a stripped
version of the Packages file from oldstable to have the version number
information available, and I'm a bit leery of including that much extra
data.
I think this is a good check, but I think it's a check that would be
better done via an archive-wide scan similar to debcheck rather than via
Lintian.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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