Hello Lintian hackers! I recently conducted a quick analysis to spot empty packages in the archive [1], some of these packages were fixed or will be in a short time frame, so I'm happy it helped maintainers to fix grave bugs. I was suggested to implement a lintian check for this issue [2], so I'm asking you how feasible my approach could be, or if you have better solutions to achieve this goal. Here is how I got my results [3], and how I'd like to implement such check. A package is declared empty if all of this conditions are met: * package does not ship files outside of /usr/share/doc/$pkg * package does not have subdirectories in its /usr/share/doc dir * package does not have files in its /usr/share/doc dir but common ones (copyright, changelog*, README, AUTHORS, NEWS, ...) * package does not have a "whitelist" word in its description: - meta - transition - dummy - dependency package - empty package - virtual package I'm aware this could lead to false positives. In my test, preliminary list of packages included some packages which didn't declare themselves as "meta packages", but I think they should warn users about their "meta" status, so they can be eventually removed. Waiting for your thoughts and suggestions (please keep me CCed) :) [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/02/msg00154.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/02/msg00164.html [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/02/msg00166.html -- .''`. : :' : Luca Falavigna <dktrkranz@debian.org> `. `' `-
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