Bug#885438: lintian: data/ permanently outdated

[Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com>]

Hi,

> My proposal is that all automatically created files in data/ are
> refreshed before each release, which probably needs some mechanism to
> do this more or less automatically

That mechanism now exists. It is called private/refresh-data (without
arguments for now). It covers many of the data sources for which
automatic updates are available. More are being added.

As a side potential benefit, much of Lintian's data is now kept in JSON format.

My suggestion would be to start running the script prior to release
time. I would only commit the results, if they look reasonable
however. I would not commit them if only the time stamps have changed.

Eventually, we might like to stop committing data to the Git repo.
Your ideas on how to achieve that in the context of Debian source
packaging from Git are most welcome. Thanks!

Kind regards
Felix Lechner