Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> writes: > On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 12:30 PM, Niels Thykier wrote:
>> We could do it like that, though the vendor profiles specification >> actually deliberately did not answer the question of how to add >> third-party checks. I know some people already do this, so we have made >> Lintian behave sanely to it. >> The official "API" for adding third-party checks (and collections) is >> on my TODO list (this incl. #359059 for those interested). > I don't think running external checkers should be third-party checks, > they should be integrated into lintian like all the other checks. The > only thing that is different for them would be the decision about when > to run them, which is IMO the role for profiles. I really disagree. I think that mingles two things together in a way that won't be helpful. The purpose of the profiles is to control which tags you want to see because your upload target is different (Ubuntu versus Debian versus Emdebian versus a local site with Debian packaging standards of their own). Checks with dependencies on other software that we don't want the main Lintian package to depend on are basically orthogonal to that. You always want to run the OCaml checks if you can; you may not be able to if you don't have the software available, but it's not something that varies from Ubuntu to Debian, etc. If we make those sorts of checks part of a profile, then everyone has to keep updating their profile to account for new checks and we end up with a combinatorical explosion of profiles to account for people who want OCaml but not Java, for Ubuntu. That's just extra maintenance burden to no good effect. And, more notably, the additional checks may themselves want to use profile information to selectively disable checks on Ubuntu, etc. Using profiles also doesn't solve the dependency problem. The design strategy for checks with external dependencies is to have them be provided as separate packages, which can optionally be installed and which will automatically enable their checks if they're installed. I think that gives us the best overall flexibility. These extra packages may all be maintained by the Lintian team if that's the way that we want to go, or be maintained by the people who are expert in that particular packaging area, or some combination of the two. I don't really want us to go hog-wild with lots of additional Lintian add-on packages, since that could make things a bit confusing. We may even want to build everything from the Lintian source package, and just break things out into separate binary packages according to the dependency impact. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qa-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87fwmgzs20....@windlord.stanford.edu