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, the manpage and the example config file[1]
will contain documentation and examples.
The User Manual[2] also saw some improvements. Particularly, it will
mention that lintian can process a .changes file and that it does
cross-package checks. Of course, it also documents the format of the
new Vendor Profiles. Though even with these improvements, the current
documentation still leaves much to be wanted.
The last unpack script (
unpack-srcpkg-l1) was finally removed and
was replaced by a smarter version of
index collection. This means
that Lintian can now schedule
index in parallel with a few other
collections (namely
unpacked, which is the current bottleneck).
The speed improvement is probably not noticeable, but it was also a
good time to upgrade our
index collection to properly handle
multi-tarball source packages. Previously Lintian only extracted the
index from the base tarball.
The
fields collection also saw some attention. Previously it
extracted fields from the control file (in the .deb, etc.) into a
directory. Each field became a file and the value of the field would
be written in the field. Today, the collection basically looks like
this:
[...]
if (-d 'fields')
system('rm', '-rf', 'fields') == 0
or die 'Could not remove old fields directory';
[...]
It has been deprecated the minute
Lintian::Collect API saw a little
upgrade to fetch these fields itself. This change should remove some
unnecessary file I/O in a normal run[3].
If you have a friend with his/her own little home-grown Lintian check
(or collection)[4], they will have to update it to A) not depend on
fields, B) use the
Lintian::Collect API for accessing fields and C)
depend on index for source packages if it uses the index information.
For the latter,
Lintian::Collect has grown support for source package
index.
Lintian has also seen a lot of decrufting in the 2.5.2 development
cycle. The new test suite now features skeletons ( standard base
environments ) and template support for all package test suites[5].
This means it takes a lot less of writing (or copy/waste) to generate
a simple specialized test in the low-level test suites. As a part
of cleaning up the test-suites, I got to run:
$ git rm t/ source,debs /*/copyright
without breaking a single test. I have to admit that
commit 8584996
is among my favorite ones in the 2.5.2 development cycle.
Finally, if you are one of the few that have ever used the
--packages-file option, then I am pleased to inform you that it will
be deprecated in 2.5.2 and replaced by
--packages-from-file. The
old option had some specialized format, whereas the new option parses
the file (or
stdin) as one package per line . The latter being far
more
"find -name '*.deb' "-friendly.
In case you are wondering why
--packages-file is deprecated, here is
the packages-file parser from lintian 2.5.1:
while (my $line = <$pkgin>)
chomp($line);
my (undef, undef, undef, $file) = split(/\s+/, $line, 4);
$pool->add_file($file);
-
[1] Installed as /etc/lintianrc
[2] Installed as /usr/share/doc/lintian/lintian. html/,txt.gz
[3] Namely, 2 opens + 2 closes + 1 read and one write for each field
in every package (the fields were cached, once they were read). Not
to mention a directory listing and having to remove the files again
later.
[4] Of course, you do not have such a thing Because we all know
that no one (except this not too close friend of yours) messes with
Internal APIs of other projects
[5] The exception being that the changes suite does not have a
standard base environment, since it would be completely unused.
Yesterday I begun using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD squeeze in thorin, my main workstation.
During the last few weeks I had to work through some of the limitations that were holding me back, such automated driver load and FUSE. I was lucky enough that other people filled the missing pieces I wanted, such as NFS client support and a GRUB bugfix that broke booting from Mirrored pools.
I have to say that I m very satisfied. Barring a pair of small nuissances here and there, the result is quite impressive:
Today I released bpo Debian-Installer with using Linux kernel 2.6.39. You know, you can 
This is a direct followup on my blog posting 
To format URLs in LaTeX, one usually uses the 
Wondering what is going on with the port of Debian to the Minix 3 microkernal? Here's an update.
dpkg Ported
Well, the big news as I mentioned in 
It has been a long time I want to prepare a 
Three things I learned about Debian s390 today:
During the past 
One of the many points that came up during the BOF is that many people Want to help but don t know where to start or how to go about it. It s a challenge for the Debian Women project to find a way to allow these people to become involved in Debian through Mini projects or something like that.
Another of the subjects that was brought up was the Debian Women mentoring project, which has been going on for quite a while now, but lacks enough publicity. So, we need to reach more people about it, and maybe also improve it with some templates, similar to the New Maintainer templates, so that mentees that don t know where to start have some sort of general path to follow.
Raphael: You created 
After 
The first day of the Desktop Summit was yesterday, Saturday, August 6. I loved it and gave a presentation. There are two very different stories I can tell on the topic of gender equality in
free software. I'll start with the bad.
The construction, deployment, and use of software involves a number of roles.
I do not have an exhaustive list, but I have a couple in my list that
seem to be surprising to some developers.
In the traditional Unix (mainframe) model, there are three roles:
The above plot was produced in a 
I got a call from Mum today to inform me that my grandmother had passed away
last night, Brisbane time, at 94 years of age.
