Bug#978552: lintian: report outdated maintainer manual pages
Package: lintian
Version: 2.104.0
Severity: wishlist
Maintainer manual pages are already reported by lintian in pedantic mode
[1]. Such manual pages may be OK per se, but, if outdated, they may
cause confusion for downstream users. Thus I think it is important to
report outdated maintainer manual pages. The same consensus seems to
have been reached on debian-med@, in a thread on manual page maintenance
[2]. I think the severity of such hint should be warning, as outdated
manual pages may be misleading to the downstream users.
To implement this hint, already existing code for locating maintainer
manual pages could be re-used. For every located maintainer manual page,
lintian should extract and compare the date and source package version
in .TH line to the actual date and version provided in the d/changelog.
Possible heuristics: upstream parts of the versions must match, date in
the manual page must be more recent than the last upload of previous
upstream release.
[1] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/maintainer-manual-page.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2020/12/msg00224.html
Andrius
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