Bug#738591: lintian: Add checker for timestamped gzip files

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2014-02-11 01:20, Jakub Wilk wrote:
> * Tomasz Buchert <tomasz.buchert@inria.fr>, 2014-02-11, 00:56:
>> There is an ongoing project to build reproducible deps (see
>> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds). One of tasks is to update
>> lintian to emit a tag on gzips that contain timestamps. I've written a
>> simple checker that does exactly that and emits
>> "package-contains-timestamped-gzip". The patch is attached.
> 
> We check for a very similar thing already in files.pm (the
> gzip-file-is-not-multi-arch-same-safe tag). Perhaps it would be better
> to reuse that code.
> 
> Niels, do you remember why we read timestamp with sysread() and unpack()
> instead of using file_info? I have a vague recollection that we did it
> on purpose, but can't remember the details.
> 

Yes, file(1) cannot reliably detect gzip files[1] and I guess I figured
it was easier to do it with sysread than have file-info-helper replace
even more of file(1) job.

>> +Severity: normal
> 
> It think it should be at most "wishlist", perhaps even "pedantic".
> 


~Niels

[1] Apparently based on the timestamp it "randomly" decides to misreport
it as a different file type. At least that is my conclusion based on the
test failures we used to have.