lintian web pages

Today was sort of an odd day. I think it counted as a "do whatever I feel like" day, but I second-guessed myself all day.

I was going to read some more in my book and then maybe work on Debian Policy, but I woke up early, got caught up on-line, and then felt like doing some lintian work. The lintian Subversion repository is still down (waiting, probably, for the maintainer to get back from holidays — there's no rush), so it was a good day for a larger project and I kept having thoughts about how I wanted to rewrite the HTML reporting script. Particularly since there were several reports today of more problems with it.

So, I started on that, figuring that I'd be done and could go read in the afternoon, and then I ended up working on it all day. It was one of those jobs that grew a lot in the doing. The data structures used by the current script were all wrong and it had hard-coded HTML in the Perl all over the place. The new version isn't tested yet, but it uses Text::Template and a much cleaner (and commented) internal design.

In the process, I not only fixed a ton of bugs but added info and overrides to the report display, which will make it much easier to look for places where lintian has things wrong.

So, that was productive, but I didn't do all the other vacationish stuff that I wanted to do, or make any progress on Policy or INN. And I kept feeling like I wanted to go do something else, or "should" go do something else, or something. Still not sure if that was just bad guilt or if I really would have been happier doing something different.

Sometimes introspection fails. But I got a bunch of work done at the end of the day, and that makes me happy.