Status on Vendor Profile
Hey,
I finally pulled myself together and spent a little more time on the
vendor-profile branch. On top of the basic profile support I added last
time (back in April) we now have non-overridable tags.
However, there are a number of things I would like some comments on,
which I hope you will take some time to look at.
First off - currently the base Debian profile and the ftp-master profile
have to be generated via "debian/rules profiles". When the main profile
is generated, the generator records all the checks in "checks/" and
enables (only) those in the profile. This has the advantage that if
someone dumps their own checks in the checks dir, Lintian will now
ignore it in the Debian profile[1].
The problem is how to handle this profile generation; for now I have
not included the generated profile in git. As far as I can tell the
best solution we have so far is to do just that and remember to update
it when adding a new check (similar to t/COVERAGE or our data files).
On a related note: we can avoid rebuilding the ftp-master profile if we
change the specification of profiles to allow referencing files
containing tags. I think this might be a cleaner solution (open the
ftp-master profile if you do not understand what I mean).
Secondly there is the handling of the "default" profile. Originally I
planned for this to be a symlink because it was easier (code-wise), but
does git handle symlinks sanely? If not, we lose the "git clone + set
LINTIAN_ROOT + run" property we have now in master (even with the
changes above).
Would it be better for us to instead rely on dpkg-vendor to supply a
default profile name (either in general or in the absence of the default
symlink)?
Third, do we install profiles in /usr/share/lintian by the default or in
/etc/lintian/profiles/ ? As I see it, there is a problem with both
ways. The first one does not work too well with --root / $LINTIAN_ROOT
changes; on the other hand if we install in /etc, it would overrule our
development profiles by default. So I am leaning towards keeping them
in $LINTIAN_ROOT, but I figured I would mention it.
~Niels
[1] The embedded people have already been doing this in two of their
packages.
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