Hi!

I would like to see if a new lintian check could be added that would
help avoiding an issue affecting the debian-installer which happens
quite frequently during Debian development cycles.

To give you a current example, the debian-installer daily builds are
currently broken due to #440731 [1].  This bug is quite simple: the
debian-installer "udeb" created by brltty depends on a normal "deb"
package.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/440731

The debian-installer is actually constituted by "udebs" which are
just reduced Debian packages.  In most of their aspects, they are pretty
close from normal Debian packages: they have Depends, Provides and
similar fields.  They currently all belong to a separate section of the
archive (debian-installer/main).

Although, except a few exceptional cases, an "udeb" cannot depend on a
normal Debian package.  Everytime this happens, something breaks in the
debian-installer.

The brltty issue comes from a new upstream version adding support for a
new external library that is not available for the debian-installer.
Thus, dpkg-shlibdeps just picked the normal Debian package to create the
substvar.

It would be great to have a lintian check that would at least warn
maintainers of such situation.  This would allow them to fix their
packages by adding the necessary --disable options instead of having to
go through a serious bug.

Do you feel that this kind of check can be added to lintian within the
current framework?  Is anything unclear?  Would anyone more familiar
with the Lintian code base than people in the debian-installer team be
inclined to work on adding such check?

Thanks for your help,
-- 
Jérémy Bobbio                        .''`. 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                    : :Ⓐ  :  # apt-get install anarchism
                                    `. `'` 
                                      `-   

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