Category Archives: Debian

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 →

This is old actually old news, but I suspect some people have forgotten or maybe do not understand to what extend. We decided to break overrides in 2.5.0~rc1[1], as explained in Raphael’s email to d-d-a@l.d.o. As the email mentions there … Continue reading →

About a week ago, I wrote about doing cross package checks in Lintian.  At that time I had only played with looking up manpages in direct dependencies, which I hope will greatly improve the current binary-without-manpage stats (around 677 packages … Continue reading →

If you have been using Lintian you may also know that it has some limitations.  One of these are that Lintian always checks every package isolated from each other unlike other tools like piuparts.  It has its advantages (such as … Continue reading →