Category Archives: Lintian
Unseen changes to lintian.d.o
We have been making a lot of minor changes to lintian.d.o and the underlying report framework. Most of them were hardly noticeable to the naked. In fact, I probably would not have spotted any of them, if I had not … Continue reading
Anti-declarative packaging – top 15 build-helpers inserting maintscripts
Debian packages can run arbitrary code via “maintainer scripts” (sometimes shortened into “maintscripts”) during installation/removal etc. While they certainly have their use cases, their failure modes causes “exciting” bugs like “fails to install” or the dreaded “fails to remove”. They … Continue reading
Putting Debian packages in labelled boxes
Lintian 2.5.44 was released the other day and (to most) the most significant bug fix was probably that Lintian learned about Policy 3.9.8. I would like to thank Axel Beckert for doing that. Notably it also made me update the … Continue reading
Performance tuning of lintian, take 3
About 7 months ago, I wrote about we had improved Lintian’s performance. In 2.5.41, we are doing another memory reduction, where we primarily reduce the memory consumption of data about ELF binaries. Like previously, memory reductions follows the “less is … Continue reading
Lintian 2.5.40 – now with less output
You have probably tried to run lintian (-EIL +pedantic) on your packages only to watch lintian drown your terminal. If you have, you would certainly not be the first. A concrete example with lintian 2.5.40.2: $ lintian -EIL +pedantic 389-ds-base_1.3.4.5-2_amd64.deb … Continue reading
Performance tuning of lintian, take 2
The other day, I wrote about our recent performance tuning in lintian. Among other things, we reduced the memory usage by ~33%. The effect was also reproducible on libreoffice (4.2.5-1 plus its 170-ish binaries, arch amd64), which started at ~515 … Continue reading
Performance tuning of lintian
For quite a while, Lintian has been able to create performance logs (–perf-debug –perf-output perf.log) that help diagnose where lintian spends most of its runtime. I decided to make lintian output these logs on lintian.debian.org to help us spot performance … Continue reading
Partial rewrite of lintian’s reporting setup
I had the mixed pleasure of doing a partial rewrite of lintian’s reporting framework. It started as a problem with generating the graphs, which turned out to be “not enough memory”. On the plus side, I am actually quite pleased … Continue reading
Lintian – Upcoming API making it easier to write correct and safe code
The upcoming version of Lintian will feature a new set of API that attempts to promote safer code. It is hardly a “ground-breaking discovery”, just a much needed feature. The primary reason for this API is that writing safe and … Continue reading
Upcoming changes to Lintian (in 2.5.22)
The next version of Lintian, 2.5.22, is long overdue – mostly because 2.5.21 FTBFS in sid. Besides fixing test failures, 2.5.22 also fixes: False-negative for most/all JAR related tags caused by file(1) changing its output for these files. A performance … Continue reading
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