Lintian 2.2.0

We're still managing to keep to the weekly release cycle and put substantial changes into each version. This makes me happy. I'm hoping that we'll be able to keep slowly working the bug count down.

This release merges quite a bit of work done by Raphael Geissert, most notably the addition of pedantic tags. Lintian has quite a few open bugs for checks that are useful in only some contexts or that check coding style issues that not everyone agrees with or wants to be bothered with, and we've been holding off on implementing those since I'd like to encourage everyone to enable info-level tags and I didn't want to just put them all in there. Now we have a new level, --pedantic, which includes all the picky stuff and the stuff that may be completely wrong.

It's up to each maintainer whether to use --pedantic at all. The tags won't be in the default lintian.debian.org view (right now, they're not there at all). If you do use --pedantic, please don't worry too much about making your package pedantic-clean unless the tags really seem like a good idea. Also, as noted in the man page, adding overrides for pedantic tags is probably not worth the effort. You should look over the report and apply human judgement. I expect this mode to be useful for sponsors, who want to be alerted to possible issues but can decide for themselves which ones to mention.

This release will also add a new page on lintian.debian.org that shows tags sorted by severity and certainty. Not only will this be useful for people looking for problems in the archive, it will also help the Lintian maintainers with updating severities and certainties. (For example, looking at the test page, I think a lot of the important tags should probably be serious instead.)

I'm currently doing a full archive run from scratch with the new version to make sure that I plugged the memory leak problems that Lintian had before and to finish fixing #507849. Once that run finishes, I'll send a "bits from the Lintian maintainers" post to debian-devel-announce with information about the pedantic mode and the new tag page.