Package: lintian Version: 2.59.0 Severity: normal Is recently discussed in a thread on debian-devel [1] there is a common error in python related auotpkgtests where py3verions -i is used to loop over 'installed' python3 versions. This is currently causing a substantial number of failures since the debci systems testing for the python3.8 as default transition have python3.7-minimal installed. This provides enough of an interpreter to count as being installed (/usr/bin/ python3.7 is present) and to run autopkgtest, but not enough for the tests themselves to succeed in most cases.
Eventually, this will stop being an immediate problem, so it would be useful to have lintian detect and warn against it so that these latent bugs don't accumulate. Preferably these packages should run their tests with all supported python3 versions. This is ensured by including python3-all in the test dependencies and using py3versions -s (instead of -i). Tests should run deterministically, not just based on whatever happens to be installed. If for some reason a package can't run tests against all supported versions, then py3versions -d should be used (test against the default version). Thanks, Scott K [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/03/msg00280.html