Improve lintian
Mentor: ?MarcBrockschmidt
Summary: Improve lintian to make it more usable in fully automated setups
Required skills:
- Perl programming
- A bit of knowledge about Debian Policy and Packaging
Description: lintian, the Debian package checker, at the moment presents possible problems in three categories: errors, warnings and informational messages. This leads to several problems, most importantly that the severity and certainty of a check can't be expressed separately. In the course of this project, the student should design and implement in lintian an improvement of the current situation, for example by using a two-letter code (one for certainty, one for severity). This will involve checking every single existing lintian rule and assign it to a new category. After the project is finished, users should be able to direct lintian to only show problems it is absolutely certain about. This feature is a prerequisite of running lintian on every package uploaded to the main Debian archive to reject packages with severe problems.
References:
Russ Allbery about the current state of lintian: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/03/msg00008.html
Some discussion about this: http://lists.debian.org/debian-lint-maint/2008/03/msg00144.html and http://lists.debian.org/debian-lint-maint/2008/03/msg00151.html