Today, I released Lintian 2.5.19. It is mostly a bug-fix release, but it also features a new tag. The new tag, homepage-in-binary-package, is emitted for packages where the source package has no Homepage-field, but one of its binaries do. The problem is that some tools (e.g. the PTS) only processes the data from the .dsc files (or Sources indices from the mirrors) and would in these cases miss the Homepage of the page.
We now also carry a work around for a bug in tool, t1disasm, where it ends up in an “infinite recursion” (i.e. until the C call stack overflows). That issue is filed as #724571. The work around is to prevent Lintian from exiting with a failure (which causes packages to be auto-rejected when uploaded to Debian archive). These problems are currently “reduced” to a warning on stderr.
In other (Lintian related news), the full run was completed yesterday after only 4 days (rather than the 8, I expected). While that is a pleasant surprise, I cannot find any changes in Lintian since the last run that would explain this difference. My current conjecture is that our last “pseudo” full run (when we added amd64) included more processing since the amd64 packages would not have any pre-collected information.
With the “follow up” run to catch packages uploaded after the full run, Lintian spent a little more than 3 and half days (~86.5 hours) processing about 20700 package groups. This gives an average of about 240 groups an hour (or ~4 a minute). Though, remember these numbers include some data having been pre-collected from previous run on the majority of packages.
