LintianHarness

FIXME

  • Should Ubuntu run lintian on main+universe+multiverse+restricted, combined, or on each separately? Having a combined result would mean its harder to concentrate on just main or just universe, but make it easier to get an overall picture of how things are.
  • What would be a good format to integrate this with the developer weather report? Or a package's status page on Launchpad?

Summary

Lintian comes with a "harness", a script that runs lintian on all (new) packages in an archive. It is not included in the lintian package, and needs to be run from the source tree. Its output is highly Debian branded, and assumes all interesting packages are in one archive ("main" for Debian). Additionally, the harness currently requires filesystem access to a Debian mirror.

This spec proposes that the harness be fixed so that it works as a standalone tool, its output can be easily branded to the distribution that uses it, and so that HTTP access to a mirror is sufficient.

Release Note

This spec has no direct end-user impact.

Rationale

It is currently a bit tricky to run the lintian harness. It would benefit both Debian and Ubuntu to make this easier.

Use Cases

  • Yvette cares about Ubuntu. She wants to make use automation to find all bugs that can be so found. She runs lintian on all Ubuntu packages and publishes the results as a website.

Assumptions

Design

The harness should do the following:

  • Read Sources and Packages files from the mirror, via HTTP.
  • Find any new packages (.dsc, .deb) from what has been tested already.
  • Download and test the new packages.
  • Output results as a set of HTML pages.
  • Output additional files for integration into the developer weather report and Launchpad (and Debian PTS).

The output files should be based on templates that can easily be customized/branded for each distribution.

Implementation

To be decided.

Test/Demo Plan

We will take a snapshot of the Ubuntu archive and run the old and new versions of the harness on it. Any differences in results will be investigated and bugs fixed.

CategorySpec

LintianHarness (last edited 2008-08-06 16:21:03 by localhost)