RFE: rpmlint

[Richi Plana]

Hi,

As a first-time Package Maintainer, I've come to realize what a great
tool rpmlint is. Even after reading the Package Maintainers Guideline, I
found rpmlint helpful in reminding me of things I've read but just
forgotten (and, *abashedly*, let me know of things I skipped over). Best
of all, most of the "info" it provided told me what the problem was, and
some of the info even told me what to do about it.

The enhancement I'm making a request of is to actually improve that
latter part: the informing the PM what to do with regards to an error.
Rpmlint is in a great position to know details of user's error. What
would be nice is if there was a main database of Errors and Warnings as
well as ways to fix it.

It would be nice if rpmlint (via the -i option) could provide more
information about fixing the problem. It could also have URL at the
bottom with a link to a wiki which could contain more information (in
case it's too long to add to the docs), and the wiki could have user
contributed notes at the bottom (a'la http://docs.php.net/manual/en/).
There could be one error or warning per page.

Example output:

$ rpmlint -i package-<version>.<arch>.rpm
package.<arch>: W: incoherent-version-in-changelog 0.99.7-1.fc7
1.0-1.fc7
The last entry in %changelog contains a version identifier that is not
coherent with the epoch:version-release tuple of the package.

Read more at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ParagNemade/CommonRpmlintErrors#head-361831a4bde352cd7587024823d9a3a40464d225



+----------+         +------+
| Database |  <----> | Wiki |
+==========+         +------+
| Errors   |
|   Fixes  |         +---------+
| Warnings |  -----> | rpmlint |
|   Fixes  |         +---------+
+----------+

Currently, there are 2 pages on the Wiki
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ParagNemade/CommonRpmlintErrors and
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/CommonRpmlintIssues ) but they
hasn't kept up with rpmlint and is incomplete. It also has some nice
nuggets that's missing from rpmlint.

This may not mean much to seasoned packagers, but wannabes are going to
find this golden.

If that's too complicated, how about an update of the
CommonRpmlintErrors page, at the least? ;)
--

Richi Plana