Hi Axel,
On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 6:45 AM Axel Beckert <a...@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > This commit has a potential to disturb the release process.
The two tests
t/recipes/checks/files/encoding/utf8-header-fix-encoding-patch/
t/recipes/checks/files/encoding/national-header-fix-encoding-patch/
contain legacy encoding and would have triggered 'national-encoding'
when Lintian is released. The Lintian maintainers, however, strive to
keep Lintian itself Lintian-clean.
The occurrence is traditionally prevented by either (1) creating the
offending files on the fly or (2) by adding a programmatic exemption
for the 'lintian' package. Here I did not do either. The latter leads
to ridicule on IRC and was remedied in a general way with this commit,
but is currently untested:
https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/4f4654ddfd2841f5440a83bc3f30b6091b10986c
So before burdening fellow maintainers with unexpected release
problems, I tested a full package build, and then ran Lintian on
itself, in a testing chroot.
I would have liked to use unstable but Lintian does not currently
build there as a result of a bug in Dpkg.
> Ah, this probably also explains why
> https://lintian.debian.org/tags.html misses some of the new tags. I
> searched for "breakout-link" in it for a reference to upstream several
> times the past few days.
Unfortunately, it does not. Over the past few months, the website has
been updated only sporadically from my own hardware and database
systems, which have more resources than the service provided by DSA.
Some details are in Bug #779228.
I am not sure sure what is causing the problems (and I am sure DSA
would provide additional resources if I asked) but for many users the
service is deficient in other ways. Most notably, it is difficult from
a scheduling perspective to provide just-in-time analysis for new
uploads. In any event, people only see those results after they
upload. Ideally, they would see them before.
To tackle that use case from a different angle, I worked with the
Salsa CI team to modify the standard runner so Lintian tags are issued
in Salsa CI. (That already happens on a regular basis, but the results
are stored as JUnit xml and generally ignored.) We added a new
standalone HTML output mode, which is described here [1]. A nice web
page that resembles lintian.d.o will be shown to a majority of Salsa
users a short time after they commit to their master branches.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lint-maint/2020/07/msg00022.html
The Lintian website will probably provide links to the relevant Gitlab
pages in Salsa. We will also advise tracker.d.o of these new resources
and URLs.
To reimagine lintian.d.o., we may also collect those individual
Lintian results for research and archival purposes. The Lintian
website will probably become a research tool for the QA team with
higher order functions that Lintian does not currently provide, such
as full dependency graph analysis, which would be appreciated by the
bootstrapping team. Some of ideas are mentioned here:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=896012#31
Thank you for your valuable contributions to Lintian, and sorry about
any inconvenience as we try to make the software better for everyone.
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
