My current forward thinking on the presentation of reports like this is
to have the script deliver pure XML and do all the formatting with
XSL+CSS. That way the formatter wouldn't need to care what the Perl
script was doing.
I'm certainly happy to accept someone else's work in that area, and the
restructuring of html_reports should make it much easier to do this. I
probably won't have time for this significant of a rearchitecture myself,
though.
Well, in order to start with an XML tree to do transforms, someone is
going to need to write the Perl to generate that from Lintian's log. I
personally don't have time to do that work. For better or for worse,
Lintian is written in Perl (which does have a rich set of XML libraries).
Another option would be to rewrite the whole reporting infrastructure in
Python, but that's a much bigger project and you'd have to duplicate some
of Lintian's core libraries to get at things like tag descriptions and
package list parsing.