Bug#698656: ITP: adequate -- Debian package quality testing tool
* Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org>, 2013-01-21, 21:16:
* Package name : adequate
Version : 0.3
Upstream Author : Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org>
* URL : http://jwilk.net/software/adequate
* License : Expat
Programming Lang: Perl
Description : Debian package quality testing tool
adequate checks quality of installed packages.
The following checks are currently implemented:
What's the advantage of adequate over lintian?
They have different scopes:
- Lintian is a static analysis tool;
- adequate examines the system on which the tested package has been
already installed to see if everything is in order.
That said, many of the Lintian checks could be re-implemented in
adequate. However, I specifically avoided implementing anything that
could be adequately (no pun intended) done by Lintian.
Let me go through the list of the checks:
* broken symlinks;
Lintian's package-contains-broken-symlink implementation is prone to
tons of false positive; this is unfixable because Lintian lacks
information about foreign packages.
* missing copyright file;
no-copyright-file is emitted by Lintian only if the copyright file is
shipped in the binary package. But Lintian can't possibly know that
/usr/share/doc/$pkg/ will disappear on upgrade.
* obsolete conffiles;
Lintian can't possibly catch this.
* Python modules not byte-compiled;
lintian4python has a check for this, which works reasonably well, but
only under assumptions that 1) the packages use helpers for
byte-compilation and 2) the helpers actually do their job correctly.
* /bin and /sbin binaries requiring /usr/lib libraries;
* underlinked binaries or libraries.
Lintian lacks information about foreign packages to perform these
checks.
I hope this answers your question. :)
--
Jakub Wilk
Reply to: