Unseen changes to lintian.d.o

We have been making a lot of minor changes to lintian.d.o and the underlying report framework. Most of them were hardly noticeable to the naked. In fact, I probably would not have spotted any of them, if I had not been involved in writing them.  Nonetheless, I felt like sharing them, so here goes.

User “visible” changes:

• The generated reports are now in HTML5 rather than XHTML. [commit:9652c2e]
• Add “alt” texts to graphs for [commit:83434ec]
• Wrap front page index in a <nav> and reword link text so they can stand alone [commit:13993c8]
• Fix index of maintainer names, so characters outside [A-Z] always go at the end plus add a link directly to that section. [commit:70a24ed, commit:94eb258]
• Put the “banner” links in a <nav> [commit:baa77fc]
• Always create an index of packages on the individual maintainer pages [commit:124f9a8]
• Wrap the above-mentioned indices in a <nav> tag [commit:2ecea9b]
• Make the links in these indices self-contained [commit:bfc5292, commit:1043d4d]
• Fix mojibake in maintainer names [commit:e907388]

In case you were wondering, the section title is partly a pun as half of these changes were intended to assist visually impaired users. They were triggered by me running into Sam Hartmann at DebConf16, where I asked him about how easy Debian’s websites were for blind people. Allegedly, we are generally doing quite good in his opinion (with one exception, for which Sam filed Bug#830213), which was a positive surprise for me.

On a related note: Thanks Luke Faraone and Asheesh Laroia for getting helping me started on these changes.

Reporting framework / “Internal” changes:

• Harness supports a “−−no−generate−reports” to make report generation optional. [commit:21fab0b]
• Reduced memory requirements for reports generation by ~15% [commit:534d169]
• Refactored reporting frontends to share the same bootstrap code as lintian/lintian-info (“dplint”) [commit:7d9a7d1, commit:97cf104, plus a bunch of refactoring leading up to those commits]
• Add “sub-resource integrity” fields in <link> tags [commit:27a367d]
• Add a “Content-Security-Policy” (via a <meta http-equiv>-tag) [commit:b022a39, commit:30bdc90]
• Support mirrors using “Packages.xz” files and without SHA1 fields [commit:d9cf314, commit:cb05f1d]
• Shuffle the lintian backlog to randomize the workload [commit:9b8873f]
• Stop lintian when the dead-line/run-time limit is exceeded [commit:7032be5, commit:7b3190d, commit:62532f8]

With the last change + the “−−no−generate−reports” option, we were able to schedule lintian more frequently. Originally, lintian only ran once a day. With the “−−no−generate−reports“, we added a second run and with the last changes, we bumped it to 4 times a day. Unsurprisingly, it means that we are now reprocessing the archive a lot faster than previously.

All of the above is basically the all the note-worthy changes on the Lintian reporting framework since the Partial rewrite of lintian’s reporting setup (~1½ years ago).