Re: [RFC] Checking for empty packages
Luca Falavigna <dktrkranz@debian.org> writes:
> 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
This looks like a good approach to me. There's a similar test in Lintian
already to determine which packages are metapackages, but it's currently
used in a much more limited way. I think Lintian excludes anything that's
named like a documentation package, but I like your approach better.
> 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.
Probably would be good to accompany this with a patch to devref
recommending a way to denote such packages.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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