Otto Kekäläinen:
Hi!
Currently Lintian requires a (source or binary) package to check[1].
However, many of the Lintian source package checks (e.g. spelling of
debian/changelog entries) don't strictly depend on anything being built.
Is anyone aware of a way to run lintian directly on a debian/ directory
contents as-is without doing a source build first?
I am exploring this in order to get my text editor to nag about findings
immediately without separate source build steps.
Otto
[1] https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/lintian/lintian.1.en.html
Paul already answered the lintian part, so I will skip that. But I also
wanted to suggest looking into integrated spell-checking in your editor
if possible. Having integrated spell-check will enable a much faster
feedback loop.
As an example, if you are using a Jetbrains IDE (such as CLion or
PyCharm Community Edition), then I added a plugin (`Debian Packaging
Support`), which among other has spell-checking of d/changelog + the
description fields inside d/control.
Alternatively, for spell-checks, I think someone once wrote a
"spellintian" that could use lintian's dataset for spell checking
without running the full lintian program. Not sure what became of it.
Best regards,
Niels