Package: lintian Severity: wishlist Dear lintian maintainers,
I would like to propose a new check for lintian. It should trigger whenever the following conditions are met simultaneously. * The binary package being processed is a development package. The easiest way probably is to look for section libdevel. * The binary package contains an ELF executable in $PATH. Rationale: Commonly, executables in development packages provide values that are relevant for using the library. Source packages that use such development packages tend to execute those executables to discover how to use the library. An alternative to this technique is to use pkg-config. When doing a cross build, host architecture binaries are not executable in general. However development packages need to be installed for the host architecture. Thus those executables are useless for cross builds if they are binary files (as opposed to scripts). Examples: The check should fire for: * libpq-dev (/usr/bin/pg_config) #794103 The check should not fire for: * libgpg-error-dev (/usr/bin/gpg-error-config is a script) * coreutils (the section is not libdevel) The tag should likely be marked as experimental, because it is very hard to fix and it may have false positives. Getting a number on the affected packages would be very useful nonetheless. Thanks for considering to add this feature Helmut -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org