On the quest for automated QA checks (was: Re: RFS: mpview)
Hi.
I think that this discussion is a nice opportunity to view a bigger
picture on what the best practices mentors use in a way to automate
things.
On May 02 2009, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> I think it's not running lintian at all, that text is just boilerplate
> which assumes mentees did run lintian.....
I don't know about the package in question, but I would like to know
what other people do to use to automate things.
IIRC, Daniel Baumann did find some errors quite quickly and it would be
nice to have a way for sponsors to see common mistakes that go a little
bit further than what lintian does, lowering the amount of time the
potential sponsors spend on trivial packaging things and focusing on
more finer, not so easily automatable things.
Maybe things that the devscripts package does could be integrated...
Some facts that are not exactly errors, but that might be annoying
include and could lead to a lot of false positives, but also finer
points where the attention of sponsors should be checked:
* for instance deprecated debhelper programs should generate a big fat
warning and, while they don't do that, detecting them.
* seeing if the rules file has the maintainer overriding, say, CFLAGS
and LDFLAGS.
* seeing if a given package providing a library has the -dev package
containing the soname in the name of the package (e.g., libfoo0-dev).
* seeing if the package would benefit from LDFLAGS like --as-needed or
-z,defs in the linking stages.
* seeing if the package properly doesn't have unnecessary dependencies.
* seeing if a -dev package has libc6-dev as one of its dependencies (it
seems that the current lintian from unstable doesn't catch this).
* seeing if the long description passes a spell checker test (running
ispell or whatever).
* seeing if the files in the debian directory have trailing whitespaces.
Well, more tests could be included (suggestions), but something along
the lines of the package "elida" would be nice to have (disclaimer: I
still don't have used this package).
Regards, Rogério Brito.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
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