Control: lintian: Extract string constants from interpreter scripts and modules
Hi Nis, On Sat, Sep 4, 2021 at 7:21 AM Nis Martensen <[email protected]> wrote: > > The content of the python module files is not checked. Sorry I took so long. Your bug is real, but I am not clear about the best solution. The change in behavior was probably introduced when I rewrote the file indices to reside in memory. Among other things, I made the code more "literate" in the sense that routines now have names that resemble more closely what they do. Twenty-two years of collective patching had led to a bit of a jumble. >From other, more prominent parts of the code I had decided that scripts were executable files with a hashbang. We devote a whole check to them. It is called 'scripts'. For your package python3-reportbug, the change resulted in a loss of functionality. I am not sure, however, that the best fix is to simply add *.py files—without an executable flag or a hashbang—to the definition of a script. For ELF executables, Lintian looks at the equivalent of 'nm' strings. It is not perfect but avoids confusion with documentation or code comments. We struggle with the issue of script parsing in other parts of Lintian, too. (See open bugs.) For this bug, I would really like to use a Python parser that extracts string constants from Python modules under /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/. I would also like to find similar solutions for other scripting languages—especially for Perl. Thank you for your diligent maintainership, and especially for this report! Kind regards Felix Lechner
