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

[Tomasz Buchert <tomasz.buchert@inria.fr>]

On 11/02/14 06:54, Niels Thykier wrote:
> 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.

Ok, no problem. Should I put the test inside files.pm then? I wanted
to dedicate a whole check for prospective reproduciblity checks.

> > 
> > 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.

That's funny! Not a problem, my prototype was written that way, but
then I found file_info and decided to do it the easy way.

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

Let's make it "pedantic", but hopefully one day
it will be "normal".

> 
> 
> ~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.
> 
> 

Cheers,
Tomasz