Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote...
> 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.
As a data point: At least three packages that entered the archive in
2018 had zero-size executables in /usr/s?bin/. The interesting part
though is these were built on Debian buildds (as part of a binNMU).
All were from the same source package that probably has a flaw in the
build system, the maintainer is already aware of that.
Still I think it's a good idea to add the check as suggested.
Addionally I'd like to suggest to check for zero-size compressed files
as well since I fail to see why anyone would ship them[1] - severity
not more than warning, though. There is already "empty-manual-page", my
proposal was somewhat a superset of that.
There a quite a few packages that ship such files. Besides manpages,
there is often /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.gz for whatever reason.
Empty files bzip2 or xz compressed have existed at least in the past,
full mirror scan is still running.
Christoph
[1] Test data is a notable exception:
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/khmer/tests/test-data/empty-file.bz2
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/khmer/tests/test-data/empty-file.gz
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