Re: Status on Vendor Profile

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2011-06-01 10:33, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> writes:
> 
>> The problem is that according to the specification, we said there would
>> be a "default" profile that would be loaded in the absence of a specific
>> profile being passed.
>>   The problem is how to we ensure that the Debian profile is available
>> and up to date in the git repository so we keep the "git-clone-run"
>> property.
> 
> Could we do something where the default Debian profile is every test
> that's found *except* for ones that specifically declare a profile other
> than the Debian profile?  That would let us add Ubuntu tests that are
> disabled by default, while having the default be to run everything that
> isn't marked to not run.
> 
> But your idea works too, particularly with the check for whether it's out
> of date.  That's not too much of a burden, I think.
> 

Perhaps have the profiles manually updated (we do not add new check
files that often) and have an automated test in t/ that requires all
tags to be emitted by at least one profile.

>> I am talking load order here (like include paths in gcc).  Lintian
>> checks the following directories (in order) for profiles:
> 
>>   $HOME/.lintian/profiles
>>   /etc/lintian/profiles
>>   $LINTIAN_ROOT/profiles
> 
>> To clear any misunderstanding, the expectation is that
>> /etc/lintian/profiles/vendor/foo.profile would override
>> $LINTIAN_ROOT/profiles/vendor/foo.profile.  Whether we use vendorX or
>> vendorY depends on --profile, $LINTIAN_PROFILE or $DEB_VENDOR.
> 
>> So my question was, if we install the profiles by default into
>> $LINTIAN_ROOT then users having an outdated $LINTIAN_ROOT (e.g. there
>> own in ~/.lintian) will get "weird errors about profile X not being
>> present".
>>   On the other hand, if we install the profiles in
>> /etc/lintian/profiles, they can change the $LINTIAN_ROOT as much as they
>> want and the profiles are still there.  However this kills the
>> "git-clone-run" property, because the development version would load the
>> profiles in /etc/lintian/profiles and not the ones you are messing with.
> 
> I think git-clone-run is really important, so I'd lean towards using
> $LINTIAN_ROOT.  I find it really, really useful to know that Lintian is
> self-contained, and having an outdated Lintian root in .lintian feels like
> an edge case to me.
> 

True, maybe I was over thinking this.

~Niels