Bug#513663: [general] need infrastructure to check related packages
Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> writes:
> I have had a look at this nearly 2 year old bug and I think it would be
> great if we could find a solution for cross-package checks. To make it
> even better I am interested in working on this. That being said I have
> not work on Lintian for very long so ...
> Is it correctly asserted that we always check source packages first
> because this is the only way we currently have to guarantee that the
> information from the source package unpacked when checking a binary
> (assuming the source is present at all)? Or is there also another reason
> for this ordering (e.g. some undocumented assumption on this)?
It looks like we currently check source packages first in the normal mode
of running lintian on a *.changes file as an artifact of the fact that
dpkg-genchanges always lists the source package first. The code (in
Lintian::Schedule) doesn't do anything particularly intelligent.
It is definitely the case that we need to check the source package before
the binary packages, or at least unpack the source package before checking
the binary packages, if we want to use metadata about the source package
in the binary package checks. I think all the cross-package checks we've
run into so far have wanted things in that order: binary checks wanting
things from the source package, but not the source checks wanting things
from binary packages.
If we start explicitly taking advantage of this by doing more
cross-package testing, we should modify Lintian::Schedule to ensure that
all source packages are checked before all binary packages even if people
are doing things like lintian *.deb *.dsc.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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