Testing LSB-compliance with Lintian

[Tim Dijkstra]

Hi Carlos,

I found in the Debian BTS for lintian (#377740) that you wrote a test to
"test LSB-compliance". Currently you check for the Dependency headers
only (which is understandable because those are what you are interested
in).

Now you've done the hard work of understanding how to write those tests,
could you maybe update your patch to also check for usage of the
log_*_msg functions? 

These functions are also needed for LSB compliant scripts (not that
policy needs that currently), but they also are a simple way of
following policy [0] wrt to console messages. 

The reason I'm interested in them is because lsb-base also provides an
easy way to override these functions. splashy (userspace splash screen)
could use that hook to get information on the status of the boot process
without hacks or extra init scripts.

Oh, some final words; I looked at your patch again and I think it has a bug.
The last test (init.d-script-has-no-lsb-runtime-information) is of type
error, which is to severe. Policy nowhere mandates LSB-compliance for
init scripts or packages as a whole. AFAIK it only talks about being an
LSB host system. All tests should be warnings IMHO. 
After reading the lintian page a bit, also warnings seem to be to severe,
but if make it a lower priority nobody will see the messages...

Thanks, 

Tim


[0] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.4