[ovs-dev] Bug#663051: Bug#663051: Lots of (sometimes serious) lintian errors

[Thomas Goirand]

On 03/08/2012 07:16 PM, Simon Horman wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> patches for any and all of the problems below would, as always, be
> gratefully appreciated.

Hi,

I'd be happy to provide such patches, but unfortunately, I'm already
overloaded with other packaging work myself. I did fix the dkms issue
because it was greatly affecting me, when doing the packaging of XCP in
Debian, and as well annoying a lot people at Citrix, and Openstack
users, for which I'm also supposed to work on (I'm a member of the
Openstack packaging team, but due to lack of time, I have let Julien
Danjou take over Openstack work lately).

If I have more time later, I'll try to provide patches.

> In particular I am unsure of how to resolve the
> openvswitch-datapath-dkms issues, do you have any ideas?

Which of the issues you don't know how to fix? There's a bunch of them.

> * I am unsure why there are errors in the openvswitch-ipsec postinst and
>   postrm scripts as that package does not provide such scripts.

Yeah! I saw that too, and was surprised as well. However, I have
checked, and lintian is quite right, there is such issue. I didn't had
time to check further though, but it might well be. But it might well be
because you are calling twice dh_installinit in your debian/rules (why
do you do that by the way?).

> Also, it would be useful to know specifically which of the issues
> listed below you regards as serious.

Well, first of all, it's an overall state of the package. You can't
leave all these lintian errors stay unfixed in the package. But here's
some that I believe are more important and should be fixed asap:

>> P: openvswitch source: package-lacks-versioned-build-depends-on-debhelper 7
>> I: openvswitch source: debian-watch-file-is-missing
>> I: openvswitch-switch: init.d-script-missing-lsb-description
>> I: openvswitch-switch: spelling-error-in-manpage usr/share/man/man1/ovsdb-server.1.gz noticable noticeable
>> W: openvswitch-switch: manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry usr/share/man/man5/ovs-vswitchd.conf.db.5.gz
>> I: openvswitch-switch: hyphen-used-as-minus-sign (lots of them)
>> I: python-openvswitch: extended-description-is-probably-too-short
>> I: openvswitch-switch: init.d-script-missing-lsb-description (many)

The above are easy to fix, right? Not so important IMO, but with a
little bit of effort, you should be able to provide a quick fix,
improving the overall quality of the package.

>> E: openvswitch-datapath-dkms: python-script-but-no-python-dep usr/src/openvswitch-1.4.0/build-aux/check-structs
>> E: openvswitch-datapath-dkms: python-script-but-no-python-dep usr/src/openvswitch-1.4.0/build-aux/extract-ofp-errors
>> E: openvswitch-datapath-dkms: python-script-but-no-python-dep usr/src/openvswitch-1.4.0/debian/ovs-monitor-ipsec
>> E: openvswitch-datapath-dkms: python-script-but-no-python-dep usr/src/openvswitch-1.4.0/xenserver/etc_xapi.d_plugins_openvswitch-cfg-update
>> E: openvswitch-datapath-dkms: python-script-but-no-python-dep usr/src/openvswitch-1.4.0/xenserver/opt_xensource_libexec_interface-reconfigure
>> E: openvswitch-datapath-dkms: python-script-but-no-python-dep usr/src/openvswitch-1.4.0/xenserver/usr_share_openvswitch_scripts_ovs-xapi-sync
>> E: openvswitch-test: python-script-but-no-python-dep usr/bin/ovs-test

These are the serious ones! A missing dependency is always a serious
issue. And it's easy to fix. Follow the guide here:

http://wiki.debian.org/Python/TransitionToDHPython2

What you are looking into is a relevant call to dh_python2 in your
debian/rules which is only calling dh_python2 without path. Something
like that:

	dh_python2
	dh_python2 /usr/src

(yes! calling dh_python2 *twice* is the way to go)

Thomas

P.S: I'm currently having a look to see if I can produce some patch.
It's just really a same that you aren't using Git on Alioth for the
packaging, it would be so much more easy if using git-buildpackage...