Bug#563773: lintian: false positive if a patch in debian/patches is a symlink

[Raphael Geissert <geissert@debian.org>]

tag 563773 moreinfo
thanks

Hi,

Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> I am working on a package in the new source format "3.0 (quilt)" and I am
> making use of its multiple-tarball feature, i.e. I have a
> foo_1.0.orig.tar.gz and a foo_1.0.orig-bar.tar.gz. The second tarball
> "foo_1.0.orig-bar.tar.gz" contains a patch "bar.patch" that I'd like to
> apply before building the package. Since I don't want to copy this patch
> over into the debian/patches directory, I create a symlink there pointing
> to "../../bar/bar.patch" and add its filename to debian/patches/series (as
> recommended in #562155). The patch gets applied and the package builds
> fine, however lintian complains with the
> "quilt-series-references-non-existent-patch".
> 

Yes, this is a known issue and I'm not sure how we are going to address it.
Inside lintian, the problem is that the tarballs are not unpacked exactly 
the same way and as such they can not be accessed via ../../something.

Since 2.3.2 lintian completely ignores patches that are symlinks, for 
security reasons.

I'm for now tagging it with 'moreinfo' because it needs to be discussed with 
the dpkg folks (whether symlinks outside the debian tarball are supported).

Cheers,
-- 
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net