Bug#626476: lintian: reduce dpkg-dev to Suggests
Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com> writes:
> Hmm. I kicked this around with some of my team. Here are a few
> alternatives, all a bit grotty in one way or another:
> * Split lintian into two binary packages, one of which only supports
> checking binary packages, and the other of which (still called
> 'lintian') supports everything and depends on the first.
This is architecturally tricky, I think, although I've not looked at it in
detail.
> * Reimplement the small number of checks we consider for this use case
> in aptdaemon or somewhere else.
I would really like to enable you to use Lintian. This is exactly the
kind of thing that I'd like to see it be usable for, and the more
different ways we use it, the more resources and bug fixes we get to make
it better for everyone.
> * Split out dpkg-source from dpkg-dev.
Obviously, this is the simplest solution from the Lintian perspective, but
I doubt the dpkg folks would be particularly thrilled by that additional
complexity for an unusual case. I'm not sure, though.
> * Observe that we already document how to unpack source packages
> without dpkg-dev for users of non-Debian systems (in
> /usr/share/doc/debian/source-unpack.txt - it currently only documents
> format 1.0, but I attached a patch to #579263 some time ago that
> updates this to 3.0), and that therefore this is an interface that
> it's not necessarily too dreadful to reimplement as long as it's
> strictly as a fallback for the case where dpkg-source is not present.
We could do this. My main concern here is that our fallback
implementation will be work to maintain if there are further changes to
the source format (3.0 git, for example), and may have interesting bugs
that are different from those in dpkg-source. (There are security issues
around this unpacking, for instance.) But if we only do it as a fallback,
and it came with some tests, this isn't too bad of a solution.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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