Re: Lintian as a static analysis framework
On 2011-07-08 10:39, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>
>> [...]
>
>> I guess that would clash with the dear old tension among minimizing
>> lintian dependencies and being able to do very specific checks. We
>> really don't want to have lintian depend on all static analysis tools
>> out there and, last time I've checked, lintian maintainers didn't want
>> to have conditional tests (i.e. tests active only when a specific other
>> package is installed) to maintain test reproducibility. I know lintian
>> maintainers have been struggling with this design decision for a while,
>> but I don't know the current state of the discussion.
>
> Right. Thats where the profiles/vendor stuff comes in I think. A
> default profile runs only the set of tests that are implemented within
> lintian. Any tests that run external commands are in a secondary
> profile and lintian warns/fails if the deps for that are missing and
> are needed.
>
We could do it like that, though the vendor profiles specification
actually deliberately did not answer the question of how to add
third-party checks. I know some people already do this, so we have made
Lintian behave sanely to it.
The official "API" for adding third-party checks (and collections) is
on my TODO list (this incl. #359059 for those interested).
~Niels
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