Bug#710086: lintian: reports package-contains-ancient-file where this is not an error
On 05/28/2013 10:42, Niels Thykier wrote:
>> I am currently working on the (re-)packaging of the "IRAF"
>> astronomical package [1]. This is a huge package with old roots --
>> the history goes back to 1981.
>>
>> Therefore, the package contains a number of files which are quite
>> old -- some help files, source examples, documentation etc. date
>> back to 1983. This leads to the Lintian *error* shown in the
>> subject. The Lintian explanation even warns "Your package will be
>> rejected by the Debian archive scripts if it contains a file with
>> such a timestamp".
>
> I believe this used to be enforced by dak in the old days and the
> Lintian check was just there to inform people of this before they
> uploaded. If I understand [3] correctly that now the check has been
> outsourced to Lintian.
No, dak itself also has a timestamp check for the contents of binary
packages: BinaryTimestampCheck in daklib/checks.py. It checks for both
files in the distant past and near future (before 1984 or more than one
day in the future).
I'm not sure if it's useful to check twice for this or if the check in
dak should be dropped. But there's a small difference: the checks from
dak itself are applied to all uploads, lintian checks only to some.
What we probably can do in any case is lowering the past cutoff year a
bit more, say from 1984 to 1975. That's still a few years behind UNIX
epoch, but would be before the FAT32 epoch[1] (but I guess the latter
might only be of interest for the *.deb files itself).
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_%28reference_date%29#Computing>
Ansgar
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