Package: lintian Version: 1.23.41 Severity: wishlist Maintainers are now starting to use symbols files, but maintaining symbols files needs quite some work and it's easy to forget doing it. It would be good if lintian could help remind maintainers that they have to update their symbols files. But there's no generic way to detect if the symbols files is up-to-date (the most reliable way is parsing the build log and checking if dpkg-gensymbols generated a particular warning but I don't think that lintian has access to the build log...).
However, I think I have some sort of work-around: the recommandation for maintainers is to remove the Debian revision part of the versions associated to symbols. For new symbols, dpkg-gensymbols will automatically add the full version of the source package. Thus if you scan the symbols files and if you find precisely a version (with a Debian revision) that matches the current version of the binary package, you should generate a warning and invite the maintainer to update all the debian/*.symbols files in the source package to include the new symbols with a version: * without the Debian revision when it's not needed, ie when the symbol has been introduced by the new upstream version and not by a change in the Debian packaging. * with a tilde after the Debian revision (-2~) when the symbol has been introduced by a packaging change. This version mangling is important in the general case so that backports satisfy the generated dependencies (X.Y-R~bpo doesn't satisfy ">= X.Y-R" while X.Y-R~bpo >= X.Y-R~ >= X.Y). You can use the Dpkg::Shlibs::SymbolsFile module if you want but you can also easily check the versions by taking the second column of all lines starting by a single space. IOW, the check is not very difficult to implement and I'd really appreciate if it could be implemented in the not-too-distant future as it would help me monitor how maintainers are handling symbols files. :) Cheers, -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.23-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages lintian depends on: ii binutils 2.18.1~cvs20071027-1 The GNU assembler, linker and bina ii diffstat 1.45-2 produces graph of changes introduc ii dpkg-dev 1.14.13 package building tools for Debian ii file 4.21-3 Determines file type using "magic" ii gettext 0.17-2 GNU Internationalization utilities ii intltool-debian 0.35.0+20060710.1 Help i18n of RFC822 compliant conf ii libparse-debianchan 1.1.1-1 parse Debian changelogs and output ii liburi-perl 1.35.dfsg.1-1 Manipulates and accesses URI strin ii man-db 2.5.0-4 on-line manual pager ii perl [libdigest-md5 5.8.8-12 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction lintian recommends no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
