Lintian 2.1.4

Lintian 2.1.4 has just been uploaded to unstable.

I'm trying to stick to a weekly schedule for releases while the pace of development justifies it, so this upload is a week after the previous upload. (We're targetting only unstable at this point and don't plan on having any of these versions release with lenny. Lintian is the sort of package for which the freeze isn't as relevant as it is for typical end-user packages.) It fixes 13 bugs and, most importantly, cleans up all the bugs that were tagged patch in the BTS. There are lots of minor changes, including a lot of new tags for random problems. The one that will catch the most people is that dh_clean -k is now deprecated in favor of dh_prep (thanks, Adam D. Barratt!).

I got to spend a lot of time this week working with the new Lintian test suite and link it a great deal. I've converted some of the more targetted old test cases to the new framework and sent out a long message to the team list on things that I'd like to add to it. The complete test suite now takes a lot longer to run, since it's broken down into more separate test cases and each one is a package build, but we're making up for that by making it easier to run all test cases that apply to a specific tag.

There aren't many structural changes in this release, just a lot of bug cleanup and random fixes. I think at least one more bug-fix release is needed to get the pending bugs back to where I like to have them (under 100 total), and then I have a large backlog of structural improvements that I'd like to work on. It's unclear, of course, how much time I'll have to work on that.

I could happily make a full time job out of working on Lintian (well, for a few months, at least). I wish I could spend this much time working on it during the rest of the year, but I can still enjoy getting to dig into it during occasional vacations, and hopefully I'll be able to do a few things during work weeks.

Many of the patches that went into this release were based on work by Raphael Geissert. Thanks to him for all of his work on Lintian.