Bug#837544: lintian: check if arch-independent packages really need "compilation"
Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.30+deb8u4
Severity: wishlist
Hello Niels.
After building a lot of packages with "dpkg-buildpackage -A", I've
noticed that quite a number of them perform a full build of the code
even if the arch-independent packages they generate just contain a
Debian changelog, a copyright file, and some documentation which is
just copied "as is" from the source package.
This is generally not a problem for very small packages which build
in a few seconds, but I guess there must be a lot of packages which
waste a lot of CPU cycles just to build the arch-independent packages.
I'd like to propose patches for those, starting from those who waste
more time, but for that I would need to know which ones they are first.
As an example, this is most CPU wasting package I found so far:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=829347
A few changes in debian/rules made the time taken to build
arch-independent packages to be reduced from several hours to just a
few seconds.
Since there is a lintian lab which checks both binaries and source code,
it would be very nice if there was a lintian check doing this:
* "Canonicalize" all files in the source code by uncompressing all the files
which are gzipped, bzipped, etc.
* "Canonicalize" all files in the arch-independent binary packages by doing the same.
* Compare md5sum (or your hash function of choice) of files in
arch-independent binary packages with md5sum of files in source
packages. If all occurrences of the first group are already in the
second group, then it is almost sure that the package does not need
"building".
This would have to be a lintian check which is neither a warning or an
error, i.e. something like "classification".
Then I could cross this information with the data I already have about
which packages take more time to build and suggest patches for the
packages wasting more time.
Thanks.
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