Bug#658847: lintian: checks for proper use of dpkg-maintscript-helper

[Sam Morris <sam@robots.org.uk>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.4
Severity: wishlist

A package that wants to invoke dpkg-maintscript-helper must do
so in each of its preinst, postinst and postrm files. However, I've
noticed several packages that do not use dpkg-maintscript-helper
properly:

	for x in {pre,post}{inst,rm}; do grep -l dpkg-maintscript-helper *.$x | sed "s/\.$x$//" | sort > /tmp/dmsh.$x; done
	vimdiff /tmp/dmsh.*

This is a crude check because it doesn't differentiate between the
rm_conffile and mv_conffile actions, but it at least shows that bluez,
fonts-arphic-uming, libmtp9 and libogre-1.7.3 are missing a call in one
of their scripts. Hence I think a lintian check would be of some help to
package maintainers.

The man page for dpkg-maintscript-helper advises invoking it in all four
maintainer scripts for simplicity's sake. That might cause too many
false positives, however.

The man page also says that packages should pre-depend on an appropriate
version of dpkg if they use dpkg-maintscript-helper in their preinst
scripts, so that should be checked too.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils                       2.22-5
ii  bzip2                          1.0.6-1
ii  diffstat                       1.55-2
ii  file                           5.09-2
ii  gettext                        0.18.1.1-5
ii  intltool-debian                0.35.0+20060710.1
ii  libapt-pkg-perl                0.1.25+b1
ii  libclass-accessor-perl         0.34-1
ii  libclone-perl                  0.31-1+b2
ii  libdpkg-perl                   1.16.1.2
ii  libemail-valid-perl            0.185-1
ii  libipc-run-perl                0.90-1
ii  libparse-debianchangelog-perl  1.2.0-1
ii  libtimedate-perl               1.2000-1
ii  liburi-perl                    1.59-1
ii  locales                        2.13-24
ii  locales-all [locales]          2.13-24
ii  man-db                         2.6.0.2-3
ii  patchutils                     0.3.2-1.1
ii  perl [libdigest-sha-perl]      5.14.2-6
ii  unzip                          6.0-5

lintian recommends no packages.

Versions of packages lintian suggests:
ii  binutils-multiarch     <none>
ii  dpkg-dev               1.16.1.2
ii  libhtml-parser-perl    3.69-1+b1
ii  libtext-template-perl  1.45-2
ii  man-db                 2.6.0.2-3
ii  xz-utils               5.1.1alpha+20110809-3

-- no debconf information