Re: Checks for urls in packages - extend lintian
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.
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).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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