Lintian and piuparts testing of Ubuntu

[Lars Wirzenius]

I have started running lintian and piuparts on Ubuntu. Lintian[1] is a
static checker for .deb format packages, and checks for many (but not
all) violations against Debian Policy[2] and some common problems. The
Debian Policy applies to Ubuntu packages also. The lintian results are
at [3]. Because of limitations in the framework that runs lintian
(lintian/reporting/harness in the source tree, specifically), it needs
to be run separately against each component: main, universe, restricted,
multiverse. I run lintian against gutsy and hardy, on i386 (the results
should be pretty much identical regardless of architecture).

[1] http://packages.debian.org/sid/lintian
[2] http://www.us.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
[3] http://people.ubuntu.com/~liw/lintian/

Piuparts[4] is a tool to verify that .debs can be installed, upgraded,
and purged, without adverse effects. It currently runs against
hardy/main on i386; I've also run it against gutsy/main i386, but since
that does not change much, I am not actively updating for the time
being. Soon, I will expand piuparts coverage to the other components,
and I will announce that when it's happening. Piuparts results are at
[5].

[4] http://packages.debian.org/sid/piuparts
[5] http://people.ubuntu.com/~liw/piuparts/

Reading piuparts results is not entirely straightforward. The log files
contain a lot of output that distracts from the main stuff: what the
actual problem (if any) found by piuparts is. The log files are divided
automatically into pass/fail, and the error message from piuparts is
towards the end of the log. However, each log file typically consists of
two piuparts runs, and the error might be in either, so one should
search for "ERROR:" in the log to find the right location. The large
amount of debugging output is there to make it easier to diagnose the
problem: in some cases the exact order of package operations (install,
upgrade, remove, purge) is surprising, and does not often occur in real
life (but sometimes does), so being able to read it from the debugging
log can be a life-saver.

The most useful directory of piuparts logs is [6], the failed ones. I do
not yet report bugs for these, since the archive is in a lot of flux, so
whatever I report today might already be fixed tomorrow anyway. However,
it would be helpful, if package maintainers would have a peek at [6]
whenever they are touching a package anyway.

[6] http://people.ubuntu.com/~liw/piuparts/ubuntu-hardy-i386-main/fail/

If someone were to want to go through the log files, and see if there
are any disastrous problems lurking in them, and report such problems
against the appropriate package in Launchpad, it would be a great big
service to Ubuntu.

If you have any suggestions on improvements on these package testing
results, please don't hesitate to e-mail me or the list.