Bug#1120737: lintian: False positive due to wrong detection of "current ar archive"

[Rafael Laboissière <rafael@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.127.0
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

The octave-statistics package contains files with the extension .a that 
are not archive files. They are text files. While we could question the 
upstream authors' choice to use the .a extension in this unconventional 
way, Lintian is producing the following error messages:

  E: octave-statistics-common: unpack-message-for-deb-data ar failed for usr/share/octave/packages/statistics-1.7.6/demos/BetaDistribution.a
  E: octave-statistics-common: unpack-message-for-deb-data ar failed for usr/share/octave/packages/statistics-1.7.6/demos/GammaDistribution.a
  E: octave-statistics source: unpack-message-for-orig octave-statistics_1.7.6.orig.tar.gz . ar failed for statistics-release-1.7.6/inst/demos/BetaDistribution.a
  E: octave-statistics source: unpack-message-for-orig octave-statistics_1.7.6.orig.tar.gz . ar failed for statistics-release-1.7.6/inst/demos/GammaDistribution.a

These are clearly false positives.

Best,

Rafael Laboissière

 [1] https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-octave-team/octave-statistics/-/blob/debian/latest/inst/demos/BetaDistribution.a?ref_type=heads
 [2] https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-octave-team/octave-statistics/-/blob/debian/latest/inst/demos/GammaDistribution.a?ref_type=heads