Lintian 2.2.1

Another Saturday, another Lintian release.

As has frequently been the case lately, much of the work was done by Raphael Geissert, who provided several more patch sets fixing new problems and old ones. I also finally got a chance to dig into the code that generates the long tag descriptions and ended up rewriting it entirely, which will remove some minor annoyances in the setup of Lintian on lintian.debian.org.

I was expecting to have a chance to write a pile of pedantic checks, since several of the old bug reports are easy checks to write and were just waiting for the new tag status. I ended up working on other things and merging patches instead, though. Maybe the next release.

One amusing note: the compressed Lintian changelog is 112KB (365KB uncompressed). The tar.gz file for the entire Lintian release is 589KB. So the changelog for Lintian is nearly 20% of the entire distribution. Admittedly, we have a fairly verbose changelog style, but most Lintian work involves large numbers of small tweaks and small patches. I think most of the changelog size is unavoidable. I don't think this is a problem — Lintian is not the sort of thing that one runs in an embedded environment and within reason it doesn't matter how large the installed size is — but it is rather funny.

I stopped the last archive-wide run because gluck was being rebooted with a new kernel that didn't cause Perl to close huge numbers of file descriptors on popen, and then due to other things going on my life, didn't get a chance to restart the archive run until yesterday. It's on binary packages starting with "p" now, so hopefully sometime tomorrow there will be fresh Lintian results with 2.2.0 and I can post a bits from the Lintian maintainers message.