Hi, I am suggesting we post another "Bits from the Lintian Maintainers" and I have attached a draft of how it could look. Feedback welcome. :)
Also, in about 12 hours from now I will be mostly unavailable for the rest of the week. So I will probably not answer to any feedback after that. Obviously I will not be around to post it before Monday (at the earliest), but feel free to do it before I return. ~Niels
Topics: - Override comments <OC> - Command-line/frontend changes <CLI> - New lab layout <LAB> - Output format changes <OUT> - GZipped lintian log <GZLL> - Help wanted <HELP> Override comments <OC> ====================== Since 2.5.3, Lintian attempts to associate comments in the overrides file to the relevant override(s). These comments are then printed next the override when --show-overrides is used. As example of how this looks: $ lintian --show-overrides lintian_2.5.4_amd64.changes N: We build-depend on cdbs for the test suite O: lintian source: unused-build-dependency-on-cdbs N: We build-depend on quilt for the test suite O: lintian source: quilt-build-dep-but-no-series-file N: We don't have a patch system for lintian itself O: lintian source: patch-system-but-no-source-readme The actual output format is not set in stone and may be changed in the future. Particularly, we are looking at making these comments directly available on the lintian.d.o pages (#512901). Please refer to the Lintian Manual [LM#2.4.2] for more information. [LM#2.4.2] http://lintian.debian.org/manual/section-2.4.html#section-2.4.2 Command-line/frontend changes <CLI> =================================== In the last two uploads we have once again changed the arguments accepted by Lintian. The following arguments/frontend features have been removed: * --arch, --archivedir, --area, --dist and --section These options (and the related LINTIAN_* variables) were used in archive-wide checks. However, this functionality has slowly migrated to the semi-public "harness" frontend. Removed in 2.5.4 * "dist" search is no longer possible. The feature could be used for archive-wide checks to schedule specific packages in the archive. However, these days archive-wide checks tend to be done by cron'ing the semi-public "harness" frontend. Removed in 2.5.4 The following arguments/features have changed semantics: * --unpack-info Explicitly requested collections are no longer auto-removed. Changed in 2.5.4 * --tags, --tags-from-file Tags requested explicitly with these options are now always visible. Changed in 2.5.3 * --quiet and --verbose If passed together, the last of these options to appear takes effect (except if --debug is also passed). Previously both could be active at the same time[1]. Changed in 2.5.3 * "lab" search has new (backwards compatible) format Due to the lab layout changes a package name and type are no longer enough to identify the packages. The new format is: [type:]name[/version[/arch]] Where [val] denotes an optional value. These are documented in the "LAB QUERY" section of the manpage. Changed in 2.5.3 * --packages-from-file Lab queries are now accepted in the file. These must be prefixed with "!query:" to be considered a query. Changed in 2.5.3 Please refer to the Lintian manpage for more details of the new/changed options and semantics. [1] In case you were wondering: --quiet would only suppress the summary message that appears if there were overrides. New lab layout <LAB> ==================== The Lintian Lab layout has changed to accomodate the ever growing number of packages in Debian. Currently unstable has over 35 000 binary packages. With the old layout this makes over 3 000 packages untestable on an ext3 file system. The new layout solves this by mimicing the mirror layout. This change breaks existing static labs and currently no migration tools are available. Though most users are not using static labs, so this is unlikely to affect anyone but lintian.d.o-like instances. Lintian has also optimized its lab usage by no longer using empty files to track unpacking state. Instead it stores the collection states in the status file. This reduces the amount of empty files in the lab with up 17 files per entry. As a side-effect of the layout changes, Lintian now supports storing multiple variants of the same package (i.e. different version or/and architecture) in the Lab at the same time. Output format changes <OUT> =========================== With 2.5.4 there are two changes in the output format. First off, the "name" of a ".changes" is now equal to the source package. Previously it was the basename (without extension) of the filename. For archive-wide lintian runs, Lintian will include more information about the tag. Tools that parse the lintian.log from lintian.d.o (and similar) will need to be updated to accept this. The old format is: C: pkg type*: tag extra* The new format (for archive-wide logs) is: C: pkg type (version) [arch]: tag extra* Note that the version *can* include a colon (an epoch). The arch field can contain spaces when processing changes files (or in very broken packages). (The * denotes an "optional" parameter) Two tools/parses that known not to be ready are "lintian-info" and UDD (#647917). You can test this format by passing the (unsupported, unofficial and undocumented) magic parameter: --exp-output=format=fullewi (NB: If you get the argument for --exp-output wrong it is silently ignored). GZipped lintian log <GZLL> ========================== lintian.d.o now provides a gzipped version of the results of the archive-wide log. The gzipped log is only a tenth of the original size (approx. 30MB vs 3.0MB) and this is including all of the override comments. :) Help wanted <HELP> ================== More hands are always welcome! Lintian is a nice project to work on when one only has an hour or two, since a lot of the requested checks don't require very much code. Work on the test suite is also much appreciated and doesn't require a large time investment. If you want to help out, take a look at the wiki page at: http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Lintian We're also looking for someone who would like to work on updating the Lintian manual. There's quite a bit about Lintian that isn't currently documented. If you're interested, let us know. If you have any ideas for new tests that would be helpful to you, please do submit them as wishlist bugs against the lintian package. It's nice to have a large collection of ideas known to be useful to someone to pick from when one has a few hours to work on Lintian.
