Lintian

Infrastructure

Interacting with the team

Usual roles

Task description

Lintian is a comprehensive package checker for Debian packages. It primarily tries to check for Debian Policy violations and violations of various sub-policies, but it also checks for best practices, common mistakes, and problems that maintainers like to catch before uploads.

Lintian by design only performs checks internal to a single source package (and binaries built from that source) which can be done without external information other than Lintian itself. This allows stability of output: Lintian will produce the same report for a given package and a given version of Lintian each time it's run. Cross-repository checks and checks for consistency and linkages between packages should be done by other tools.

The team also maintains http://lintian.debian.org/ as a presentation of the results of running Lintian on the entire archive. Currently, due to limitations in both disk space and available CPU, as well as limitations in Lintian's archive-wide configuration abilities, these checks are only done for arch: i386, arch: amd64 and arch: all packages in sid and experimental.

Get involved

Have a look at /HackersGuide for hints.

Easy Projects

Larger Projects

Hard Projects

More stuff

This is a somewhat random collection of additional notes about Lintian, mostly from the DebConf7 Lintian BOF.

Documentation

When submitting a request for a Lintian auto-reject tag against ftp.debian.org, please use the following usertags:

Derivatives