Package: lintian Version: 2.5.30+deb8u4 Severity: wishlist Hello Niels.
After building a lot of packages with "dpkg-buildpackage -A", I've noticed that quite a number of them perform a full build of the code even if the arch-independent packages they generate just contain a Debian changelog, a copyright file, and some documentation which is just copied "as is" from the source package. This is generally not a problem for very small packages which build in a few seconds, but I guess there must be a lot of packages which waste a lot of CPU cycles just to build the arch-independent packages. I'd like to propose patches for those, starting from those who waste more time, but for that I would need to know which ones they are first. As an example, this is most CPU wasting package I found so far: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=829347 A few changes in debian/rules made the time taken to build arch-independent packages to be reduced from several hours to just a few seconds. Since there is a lintian lab which checks both binaries and source code, it would be very nice if there was a lintian check doing this: * "Canonicalize" all files in the source code by uncompressing all the files which are gzipped, bzipped, etc. * "Canonicalize" all files in the arch-independent binary packages by doing the same. * Compare md5sum (or your hash function of choice) of files in arch-independent binary packages with md5sum of files in source packages. If all occurrences of the first group are already in the second group, then it is almost sure that the package does not need "building". This would have to be a lintian check which is neither a warning or an error, i.e. something like "classification". Then I could cross this information with the data I already have about which packages take more time to build and suggest patches for the packages wasting more time. Thanks.
