On 05/18/12 23:27, Russ Allbery wrote: > Simon Kainz <simon@familiekainz.at> writes: > >> After thinking about some time how to find/fix broken links in >> package descriptions, i came up with the following idea: > >> I think it would be better to extend lintian to check for broken >> urls (Homepage, VCS-Browser, Vcs-*). > >> Is it okay if lintian needs network/internet access ( a patch is >> already available checking for the Homepage field, using LWP) ? > > One of the design principles of Lintian is that if you run the same > version of Lintian on the same package, you should always get the > same results. The results won't vary over time. We rely on this > for lintian.d.o, for example, and never regenerate checks for a > package unless the package or Lintian have changed. > ok, good point. I didn't want to inject unnecessary dependencies - also this should not hinder development. > That said, one of the things that we (well, mostly Niels, as I've not > had time to work on Lintian in quite a while) have been working on is > making it easier to add pluggable modules to Lintian. That means > that if you find the Lintian framework helpful, you could potentially > implement the check as a plugin to Lintian and use the Lintian > infrastructure. But it wouldn't be something that we'd turn on by > default in Lintian due to the above design principle (even apart from > the issue of requiring network access). Yes, I fully agree with that. Problem still is, if this is something one has to specifically activate, i'm pretty sure only very few people will actually run this check. I thought about this check notifying with Severity: "minor" and Certainty "possible" or "wild-guess" to show that this is more a "maybe take a look and fix it, unless you are offline" issue or so... Regards, Simon
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