Re: Running Lintian on non-Deb distribution

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2013-09-09 15:48, Peter Åstrand wrote:
> 
> I've tried running Lintian on a non-Deb distribution: CentOS 6. Despite
> installing a lot of dependency packages, I failed. I tried to do a
> source code installation from lintian_2.5.17.tar.gz, but was surprised
> to find out that there's no Makefile, configure script or even a (final)
> README file in there. It seems like the only way you can build and
> install lintian is by doing it through dpkg. Why?
> 
> Rgds, ---
> Peter Astrand        ThinLinc Chief Developer
> Cendio AB        http://cendio.com
> Teknikringen 8        http://twitter.com/ThinLinc
> 583 30 Linkoping    http://facebook.com/ThinLinc
> Phone: +46-13-214600    http://plus.google.com/112509906846170010689
> 
> 

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your interest.  Indeed, we do not have a proper build system
for lintian.  I believe we have talked about adding one a long time ago,
but it hasn't been a high priority - partly because Lintian does not
really need to be "built" per se[1].
  But perhaps it is time for us to setup a proper distribution
"independent" build system[2].  I will get in touch with some Debian
Perl people and see what I can do.

~Niels

[1] Being just a set of perl scripts and modules, Lintian can be run
directly from extracted source.  See

  https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Lintian/HackersGuide

(or "perldoc doc/README.developers" in the unpacked source package).
Both documents contain a recipe for running lintian directly from the
extracted source (despite saying "git", it should also apply to the
unpacked source tarball).

The recipe should work equally well for lintian-info.

[2] As indepedent as it gets when the test suite requires at least 3
Debian specific build tools.