#980862 lintian: Add detection of typo in d/control: not a dot separating description lines

Package:
lintian
Source:
lintian
Submitter:
Vasyl Gello
Date:
2021-01-27 18:15:02 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
Tags:
#980862#5
Date:
2021-01-23 10:51:00 UTC
From:
To:
Dear colleagues,

Today Beatrice spotted a typo in d/control that slipped past me, Mattia and Lintian.
I think the situation described in Bug #980853 deserves a new Lintian tag.

As a very first step I crafted the following one-liner to test if I made more similar typos:

find -name control | while read FILE
do
    if grep "^[ ,]*$" "$FILE" | grep -q -v "^$"
    then
        echo "$FILE"
    fi
done

I feel the automation of detection is trivial: we check the lines of Description and License fields
of  d/control and d/copyright files, respectively, against the regexp like '/^[ ]*[,:+%&-]*$/' and
emit a warning because it breaks i10n.

Sincerely,
Vasyl
#980862#10
Date:
2021-01-27 17:59:38 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Vasyl,

My preference would be to warn on any single character in second
position (no asterisk) but without special mention of i10n.

    /^ [ ] . $/sx

I believe that the formatting error described in Bug#980853 relates
primarily to the extended, dot-separated text format in Deb822 files,
and not necessarily to i10n (translations are not a concern in
d/copyright). Would that be acceptable?

Kind regards
Felix Lechner
#980862#15
Date:
2021-01-27 18:12:23 UTC
From:
To:
CC to bug :)


Hi Felix!

Totally acceptable, thanks! :)