Lintian and Policy updates

I'm a bit slow on the journal-writing front, but belatedly I should mention here that I did upload the new Policy (3.8.0.0) and then a quick bug-fix. If you have a trigger-enabled dpkg, you don't see that you're registering non-existent doc-base files.

Lintian should catch that, but doesn't. Yet.

I've been trying to find time to kick off the next round of Policy updates. There are several proposals that just need text written for them: #143941 and #241333 are obvious at this point, #416450 should be fairly simple, and I think the due diligence has been done on #470994. There are other fairly straightforward ones too. If anyone beats me to it for any of those (or even better, other bugs), I won't complain.

I also closed all of the old Policy bugs that we'd tagged wontfix except for one that I forwarded to the tech-ctte.

I also uploaded Lintian 1.24.0 on Saturday. This contains the first steps in a better documented and hopefully faster and cleaner way of extracting information from the lab. Rather than opening and reading files in every check that need data, there are now Lintian::Collect modules that can hold common code and cache the results across multiple different check scripts. Currently, they're not widely used, but they're now available to all checks (hence the version bump).

This release also contains some truly fantastic work by Jordà Polo Bardés on the web site. Look at lintian.debian.org now. It looks like a real web site! Jordà is working on a Google Summer of Code project for Lintian, but it wasn't even the web pages; that was just a bonus. I'm very happy with the outcome.

Lintian is still above 100 bugs and I want to start expanding the new infrastructure, so there's more work to be done, but I'm very happy with the progress lately. And it was fun to spend two days solid working on Policy and Lintian for a change, instead of lots of different work projects (or feeling low on energy and barely managing to get a handful of things done).