Category Archives: Lintian

Thanks to a heads up from Bastian Blank, I learned that Lintian 2.5.7 and 2.5.8 were horribly slow on the Linux binaries.  Bastian had already identified the issue and 2.5.9 fixed the performance regression. But in light of that, I … Continue reading →

I have been avoiding #629247 for quite a while. Not because I think we couldn’t use a better shell parser, but because I dreaded having to write the parser. Of course, #629247 blocks about 16 bugs and that number will … Continue reading →

The new version of Lintian (2.5.8) can pretty much be summed up as: Its like 2.5.7, only with less false positives and no FTBFS. Especially people annoyed by the hardening flags will hopefully find that 2.5.8 greatly reduces the number … Continue reading →

If you want to enable all Lintian tags, just remember the phrase: Some sponsors are “evil and pedantic” Or on the command-line: $ lintian -EvIL +pedantic … It works for Lintian 2.5.5 (and newer), which handles “pedantic” like other severities.  … Continue reading →

Lintian uses some small scripts to “collect” data from packages. In daily talk, they are usually referred to as “collection” scripts. Lintian uses files to track the status of “collection” scripts between runs. Consider the following directory listing on lintian.d.o: … Continue reading →

Are you using DEP-5 in copyright file? Are you doing it right? Thanks to the work of Jakub Wilk, Lintian 2.5.3 will spot some of the regular mistakes (including syntax errors) and check if you are using the newest revision. … Continue reading →

Documentation! That is what the next version of Lintian will have. In 2.5.1, Lintian had support for adding options in the lintianrc. Unfortunately, the user had to guess the syntax, which makes the feature less useful. With the next release, … Continue reading →

During the past week I finally got around to give the Vendor Profiles branch some attention. I suspect the most exciting change is that I got support for non-overridable tags. Along with making –ftp-master-rejects an alias for the ftp-master profile. … Continue reading →

In the new version of Lintian there has been some more changes to overrides as well as a couple of new changes. First of, we fixed a false-positive with the embedded-library tag. Lintian would incorrectly use the source-field of a … Continue reading →

While we are waiting for Lintian 2.5.0~rc3, here is a little update on what you can look forward to. About a week ago I had the pleasure of merging my branch into the Lintian master branch. While the IRC bot … Continue reading →