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Re: Lintian warning messages



Hi Richard,

On Tuesday 5 August 2008 14:02, Richard Hurt wrote:
> I am getting quite a few lintian warnings that I would like to quell.
> Do we have any best practices on how to deal with these messages?
>
> W: <package>: debian-copyright-line-too-long  -- As I understand it
> long lines are now OK.  I am following the new, proposed guidelines
> for the copyright file (http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/
> CopyrightFormat) and it almost guarantees long lines.

This warning has been scratched from the upcoming Lintian version so I would 
not worry about it.

> W: <package>: script-non-executable  -- Since this is a scripted web
> application (RoR) there are quite a few "scripts" that are not
> executable directly in the shell.  Can I turn this warning off for
> these files?

Maybe you could find out why this warning is triggered. Probably, these 
scripts have shebang lines (#!/usr/bin/ruby  perhaps?) but are not 
executable. That doesn't match, as the shebang line is useless if the script 
is not executable.

So if they're not going to be executed on the shell anyway, upstream can 
remove those shebang lines. That said, I don't think it's necessary to be 
going through the effort to make a Debian-specific patch to the source for 
that.

> W: <package>: extra-license-file  -- There are several LICENSE files
> scattered throughout the package and I have documented them in the
> copyright file.  Do I need to do anything with these?  Should I remove
> them or is there a way to ignore them?

Just remove them when building the package (e.g. doing rm in debian/rules 
somewhere after the dh_install). It's useless cruft that we do not want to 
see installed on user's systems.

In general it's worth the effort to put extra commands in your debian/rules 
file if that causes less unnecessary things on the user's system - a package 
is rarely built but after that installed on many systems.

> W: <package>: embedded-javascript-library  -- Basically, prototype.js
> (versions 1.6.0.1 & 1.5.0) is being used in several places.  Obviously
> it would be best to depend on the libjs-prototype package and remove
> the embedded versions.  Once I get upstream using a single version of
> prototype do I just remove the original prototype.js files and symlink
> to the package version?

Yes, that would probably work fine. Until then, just keep the warning to 
remind you and others that this isn't done yet.

> W: <package>: package-contains-empty-directory  -- Some of these are
> necessary (cache, assets, etc.) and some aren't (test).  Can I turn
> these off?

You can remove the unnecessary ones (similar to the licence files above) and 
add overrides for the needed ones.


cheers,
Thijs

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