Bug#885438: lintian: data/ permanently outdated

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

gregor herrmann:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.66
> Severity: normal
> 
> One of my pet peeves with lintian is that the files in the data/ dir
> are permanently outdated, as they are not automatically recreated
> before a release.
> 
> Usually I only notice that if data/fields/perl-provides strays from
> reality but today I decideded to take a closer look and ran all the
> private/refresh-* scripts, and the result is something like
> 
> 18 files changed, 1108 insertions(+), 1062 deletions(-)
> 
> which is still not reflecting reality, as those scripts sometimes
> need a directory argument and sometimes don't, and sometimes write to
> a file and sometimes to stdout, and sometimes accept a Contents-*.gz
> file (which doesn't exist anymore locally) and sometimes don't, and
> sometimes can be called directly, and sometimes are manually or
> automatically called from debian/rules … etc.
> 
> 
> My proposal is that all automatically created files in data/ are
> refreshed before each release, which probably needs some mechanism to
> do this more or less automatically; and I'm sorry for not providing a
> nice patch series right now but I'm kinda lost in this organically
> grown setup …
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> gregor
> 
> 

Hi gregor,

Indeed, you are correct and we have it on an internal todo list (in
private/TODO):

"""
private:

- Provide a general framework for updating metadata about the archive
  and modify all of the private/refresh-* scripts to use it.  Also set
  up something in debian/rules that will run all of them and update data
  accordingly which can be done routinely before every release.
"""

That item has been there before I joined the lintian team (i.e. 6-7+
years), which implies that we will need someone with time + energy to
write patches for it.

Note that this may be easier to do today as apt now provides an
infrastructure for fetching metadata (e.g. apt-get indextargets).

Thanks,
~Niels