Re: Checking vs. building packages; Lintian's relationship with Dpkg and Debhelper
Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:
> The best outcome would be a simple and logical rule to divide tasks
> between our tools. For example, it could be helpful if Dpkg and
> Debhelper prevent only the creation of packages that cannot be built or
> unpackaged safely.
Why? If something is in error, preventing the package from building
entirely ensures that the error is fixed. Linting is optional; I don't
think it makes sense to rely on linting to reject invalid packaages.
> This message was prompted by recent changes in Dpkg which, if you
> haven't noticed, encroach a little bit on Lintian's traditional area of
> expertise. Because Dpkg now fails to build some of Lintian's test
> packages, the tags can no longer be tested and will be removed from
> Lintian.
Seems like a positive development. Less code for Lintian to maintain,
less code to check, fewer broken packages in the archive... a win all
around.
dpkg has been picking up basic sanity checks for obvious packaging bugs
from Lintian going back to when I was the primary maintainer, so quite a
long time ago now. That has frequently invalidated some tags and some
Lintian checks, which is a good excuse to happily delete code. I thought
of it similar to deprecation warnings in a language becoming errors in a
later release as the semantics of the language are tightened, removing
work from linters.
> Like so many things Guillem writes, that is a mischaracterization.
I'm not sure what's going on between you and Guillem (and am not sure I
want to know), but the way you keep sniping at him is uncomfortable to
read and rather off-putting.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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