Bug#917566: lintian: please warn about non-supported previous versions

[Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>]

Dmitry,

> > > As of implementation side, given that Lintian by design do not use
> > > network, it is possible to assume that Debian release happens once a 2.5
> > > year (or so), so versions older then 5.5 years (possible to lookup in
> > > d/changelog) are below threhold.
> > 
> > Alas, unless we can think of a more-reliable way of doing this I fear this
> > will be far too full of false-positives or will simply not detect enough
> > cases to be prioritised. :(
> 
> Well, we could hardcode dates of Debian releases in Lintian.

This is the easy part. The difficult parts I was referring to are:

  a) The dates in the debian/changelog file cannot "know" that that
     was the version in a stable release.

  b) The parsing of the maintainer scripts is going to be very messy
     and error prone.

> 10 dates. Any reference to version, older then two releases ago would be
> warrant low-severity moderate-certanity notification.
> 
> After all, how often do we have something like 2.76-4 in code is not version?

I don't follow this, sorry. You seem to be referencing an example
(?).


Best wishes,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-