Bug#651332: lintian: unhelpful message if changes file not present

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2011-12-07 21:32, Nicholas Bamber wrote:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.4
> Severity: minor
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 

Hi,

>    * What led up to the situation?
> I have script that generates a private Debian package,
> builds it and runs lintian on the resulting changes file.
> I changed the name of the generated package in the test script
> and forgot that the test script needed to be updated.


Is it possible to get one package/changes that emits this issue I can
test against along with invocation example?

> This led to an utterly bizarre error message:
> 
> "Package name and type must be defined at /usr/bin/lintian line 1692"
> 

I have identified the source of the error message, but I am not quite
sure how it got there.

> I understand that lintian runs on a layered approach and that the
> error was finally spotted deep in the code. It would be nice if the arguments
> were sanity checked right at the beginning as the message then would
> be immediately obvious.
> 
> [...]

:)

~Niels