Re: Checks for urls in packages - extend lintian

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

Simon Kainz <simon@familiekainz.at> writes:

> Hi,
>
> 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) ?
>
> What are your thoughts about this?

I often run lintian as part of an automatic build & check system, that
does not have network access at all. So such a check would invariably
fail there.

It would also present a lot of false positives during any kind of
network problems, and would never be reliable (what if your ISP filters
a particular domain? Or if your company's proxy is misconfigured and
serves you a 10 year old cached copy?)

So while this check IS a good idea, and would certainly help, I don't
think it should run without explicitly asking lintian to do so.

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