Bug#919458: lintian: add tag for empty executables

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.121

Hi lintian maintainers,

On 15/01/2019 06:03, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> Control: severity -1 grave
> Control: tag -1 patch
>
> Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org> (2019-01-15):
>> For some reasons, libtool and its manpage (from the libtool-bin binary)
>> are “sanitized” in binary-indep, which might explain why it's only
>> showing up on the maintainer build which was likely using “-b”.
>>
>>> $ dpkg-deb -c libtool-bin_2.4.6-7_amd64.deb
>>> -rwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2019-01-12 09:10 ./usr/bin/libtool
>>> -rw-r--r-- root/root        20 2019-01-12 09:10
./usr/share/man/man1/libtool.1.gz
>>
>> The manpage is a gzipped empty file.
>
> I'm afraid the situation is pretty bad, as an empty executable doesn't
> do anything but also produces no errors; so I fear any packages having
> been built using this version of libtool-bin on amd64 has likely missed
> a step or two without that getting noticed…

Could we add a lintian tag for empty executables, particularly in PATH? Then we
could turn that into an autoreject (after analysing the results when
lintian.debian.org is updated) and help prevent this kind of brokenness in the
future.

See #919341 for context.

Thanks,
Emilio