Re: Lintian behavior when unknown tags are passed to it

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2015-02-06 23:34, Rajendra Gokhale wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> First of all, I wanted to let you know that lintian is a cool tool and
> thank you all for creating and maintaining it
> 

Hi, :)

Thanks,

> If I ask Lintian to suppress a tag that is known to a later version of
> Lintian but not known to the current version it will exit with an error.
> This can be problematic in an environment where a package gets built on
> different versions of OSes running different versions of Lintian
> (potentially).  Is there a recommended way to getting around such a
> scenario?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Rajendra Gokhale
> 

It is possible, although there is not really a built in solution for it.
 You can use lintian-info to query for known tags vs unknown tags.  I
suspect something like the following sh/bash template might work:

"""
SUPPRESSED_TAGS=
for tag in <LIST-OF-TAGS-TO-SUPPRESS> ; do
  if lintian-info -t $tag > /dev/null ; then
    SUPPRESSED_TAGS="$SUPPRESSED_TAGS,$tag"
  fi
done

if [ "$SUPPRESSED_TAGS" != "" ] ; then
  SUPPRESSED_TAGS=$(echo "$SUPPRESSED_TAGS" | sed 's/^,//')
fi

lintian --suppress-tags "$SUPPRESSED_TAGS" <OTHER-ARGUMENTS>
"""

Though it can have a considerable overhead if <LIST-OF-TAGS-TO-SUPPRESS>
is rather long, as it has to invoke lintian-info once for each of them.

Thanks,
~Niels