Bug#759403: lintian: Please publish machine-readable report for all packages

[intrigeri@debian.org]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.25
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

on the pkg-perl team, we would like to track the hardening status of
our packages (same goes in Tails, to track the hardening status of the
packages we ship).

The easiest way for us would possibly be to retrieve data about all
packages from lintian.d.o, filter on the maintainer field, and build
statistics and graphs from that.

I've had a look at the html_reports script, which seems to be the best
place to generate the file I'd like to see on lintian.d.o. Much alike
it generates qa-list.txt already, something like packages-binary.yml
could be created there. Its format could be something like a list of:

- $BINARY_PKG_NAME:
  maintainer: ...
  version: ...
  source: ...
  tags:
    - $TAG_NAME:
      severity: ...
      certainty: ...

Of course, for consistency, generating packages-source.yml would be
good too, although I don't need that right now.

I've given it a try, but was quickly discouraged by the need for
a local lab (and mirror?), which I have no experience with.

I'd welcome any hint and guidance regarding the relevance of the
general idea, the rough design outlined above, and locally testing an
implementation I could come up with.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri