Category Archives: Lintian

Yesterday, I have managed to finish up an old pet peeve of mine.  I wrote a series of patches to have harness reprocess all packages, which were last checked by an older version of Lintian than the current.  It is … Continue reading →

I have decided to step down as main maintainer of Lintian and pass the baton to Bastien Roucariès.  This is actually “fairly” old news, since I announced this almost a month ago.  However, I was not very vocal about it … Continue reading →

Today, I released Lintian 2.5.19.  It is mostly a bug-fix release, but it also features a new tag.  The new tag, homepage-in-binary-package, is emitted for packages where the source package has no Homepage-field, but one of its binaries do.  The … Continue reading →

Today I had to pleasure of releasing Lintian 2.5.18.1.  It is a minor bug fix release on top of Lintian  2.5.18 (which I also released today…).  When I was about to deploy the new version of Lintian on lintian.debian.org, I … Continue reading →

I have just uploaded Lintian 2.5.18 to unstable.  While fixing 22 bugs, it only features 5 new tags. debian-changelog-has-wrong-weekday debian-rules-missing-good-practice-target-dfsg empty-udeb-package file-name-in-PATH-is-not-ASCII misplaced-extra-member-in-deb The release also include fixes to some false-positives, such as “python:any” dependencies triggering python-script-but-no-python-dep, a rewritten README … Continue reading →

We finally managed to deal with one of the major runtime bottlenecks in Lintian.  Previously, our usage of file(1) would sometimes spend a long time classifying various text files.  In Lintian 2.5.14, we applied a series of patches that allowed … Continue reading →

In January, I did a “TV-shop ad”-style post on a little script called “lintian-overrider” and it prompted Simon to ask: That’s a great tool, but don’t you fear it makes unjustified overrides too easy ? In my experience, people sometimes … Continue reading →

Have you ever tried to add a Lintian override only to get it wrong?  Fret not, with the “Lintian-overrider 2000” such are problems of the past!  Simply feed the tag emitted by Lintian to the Lintian-overrider 2000 and it will … Continue reading →

In 2011, I wrote about how small files could consume a lot of space. I meant to do a follow-up on the savings but I forgot about it until now. In 2.5.7, we started compressing some of the collected data … Continue reading →

$ LINTIAN_ROOT=. perl lintian-ng ../lintian_2.5.10.dsc Successfully unpacked 1 packages Did you know that source:lintian/2.5.10 contains 3745 files or/and directories (excl. root dir) This useless information was brought to you by Lintian-NG $ git describe 2.5.10-61-g7670427 $ wc -l lintian-ng 90 … Continue reading →