Ubuntu Manpage: lintian - Static analysis tool for Debian packages

NAME

       lintian - Static analysis tool for Debian packages

SYNOPSIS

       lintian [action] [options] [packages] ...

DESCRIPTION

       Lintian dissects Debian packages and reports bugs and policy violations.  It contains
       automated checks for many aspects of Debian policy as well as some checks for common
       errors.

       There are two ways to specify binary, udeb or source packages for Lintian to process: by
       file name (the .deb file for a binary package or the .dsc file for a source package), or
       by naming a .changes file.

       If you specify a .changes file, Lintian will process all packages listed in that file.
       This is convenient when checking a new package before uploading it.

       If you specify packages to be checked or use the option --packages-from-file, the packages
       requested will be processed.  Otherwise, if debian/changelog exists, it is parsed to
       determine the name of the .changes file to look for in the parent directory.  See
       "CHECKING LAST BUILD" for more information.

OPTIONS

Actions of the lintian command: (Only one action can be specified per invocation)

-c, --check
Run all checks over the specified packages. This is the default action.

-C chk1,chk2,..., --check-part chk1,chk2,...
Run only the specified checks. You can either specify the name of the check script or
the abbreviation. For details, see the "CHECKS" section below.

-F, --ftp-master-rejects
Run only the checks that issue tags that result in automatic rejects from the Debian
upload queue. The list of such tags is refreshed with each Lintian release, so may be
slightly out of date if it has changed recently.

This is implemented via a profile and thus this option cannot be used together with
--profile.

-T tag1,tag2,..., --tags tag1,tag2,...
Run only the checks that issue the requested tags. The tests for other tags within
the check scripts will be run but the tags will not be issued.

With this options all tags listed will be displayed regardless of the display
settings.

--tags-from-file filename
Same functionality as --tags, but read the list of tags from a file. Blank lines and
lines beginning with # are ignored. All other lines are taken to be tag names or
comma-separated lists of tag names to (potentially) issue.

With this options all tags listed will be displayed regardless of the display
settings.

-X chk1,chk2,..., --dont-check-part chk1,chk2,...
Run all but the specified checks. You can either specify the name of the check script
or the abbreviation. For details, see the "CHECKS" section below.

General options:

-h, --help
Display usage information and exit.

-q, --quiet
Suppress all informational messages including override comments (normally shown with
--show-overrides).

This option is silently ignored if --debug is given. Otherwise, if both --verbose and
--quiet is used, the last of these two options take effect.

This option overrides the verbose and the quiet variable in the configuration file.
In the configuration file, this option is enabled by using quiet variable. The
verbose and quiet variables may not both appear in the config file.

-v, --verbose
Display verbose messages.

If --debug is used this option is always enabled. Otherwise, if both --verbose and
--quiet is used (and --debug is not used), the last of these two options take effect.

This option overrides the quiet variable in the configuration file. In the
configuration file, this option is enabled by using verbose variable. The verbose and
quiet variables may not both appear in the config file.

-V, --version
Display lintian version number and exit.

--print-version
Print unadorned version number and exit.

Behavior options for lintian.

--color (auto|never|always|html)
Whether to colorize tags in lintian output based on their visibility. The default is
"auto" will use color only if the output is going to a terminal. "never" will never
use color, "always" will always use color, and "html" will use HTML <span> tags with a
color style attribute (instead of ANSI color escape sequences).

This option overrides the color variable in the configuration file.

--hyperlinks (on|off)
Shows text-based hyperlinks to tag descriptions on lintian.debian.org on terminals
that support it. The default is on for terminals that support it, unless the user
selected '--color never'. This currently only works in GNOME Terminal.

This option overrides the color variable in the configuration file.

--default-display-level
Reset the current display level to the default. Basically, this option behaves
exactly like passing the following options to lintian:

-L ">=warning"

The primary use for this is to ensure that lintian's display level has been reset to
the built-in default values. Notably, this can be used to override display settings
earlier on the command-line or in the lintian configuration file.

Further changes to the display level can be done after this option. Example:
--default-display-level --display-info gives you the default display level plus
informational ("I:") tags.

--display-source X
Only display tags from the source X (e.g. the Policy Manual or the Developer
Reference). This option can be used multiple times to add additional sources.
Example sources are "policy" or "devref" being the Policy Manual and the Developer
Reference (respectively).

The entire list of sources can be found in $LINTIAN_BASE/data/output/manual-references

-E, --display-experimental, --no-display-experimental
Control whether to display experimental ("X:") tags. They are normally suppressed.

If a tag is marked experimental, this means that the code that generates this message
is not as well tested as the rest of Lintian, and might still give surprising results.
Feel free to ignore Experimental messages that do not seem to make sense, though of
course bug reports are always welcome (particularly if they include fixes).

These options overrides the display-experimental variable in the configuration file.

--fail-on {error | warning | info | pedantic | experimental | override | none}
Causes lintian to exit with a program status of 2 for the given conditions. This
option can be a comma-separated list, or it may be specified multiple times.

The default is error. Also, 'warning' does not imply 'error'. Please specify both if
you want both.

-i, --info
Print explanatory information about each problem discovered in addition to the lintian
error tags. To print a long tag description without running lintian, see
lintian-explain-tags(1) or check the website at https://lintian.debian.org.

To negate it, please use --no-info.

This option overrides info (or no-info) variable in the configuration file.

-I, --display-info
Display informational ("I:") tags as well. They are normally suppressed. (This is
equivalent to -L ">=info").

This option overrides the display-info variable in the configuration file.

Note: display-level and display-info may not both appear in the configuration file.

-L [+|-|=][>=|>|=|<|<=][S|C|S/C], --display-level [+|-|=][>=|>|=|<|<=][S|C|S/C]
Fine-grained selection of tags to be displayed. It is possible to add, remove or set
the levels to display, specifying a visibility (error, warning, info, pedantic, or
classification. The default settings are equivalent to -L ">=warning".

The value consists of 3 parts, where two of them are optional. The parts are:

modifier operator
How to affect the current display level. Can be one of add to ("+"), remove from
("-") or set to ("=") the display level(s) denoted by the following selection.

The default value is "=" (i.e. set the display level).

set operator
The visibility to be selected. The operator can be one of ">=", ">", "=", "<" or
"<=". As an example, this can be used to select all info (and more serious) tags
via ">=info".

The default value is "=", which means "exactly" the given visibility.

This option overrides the display-level variable in the configuration file. The value
of the display-level in configuration file should be space separated entries in the
same format as passed via command-line.

Note: display-level may not be used with display-info or pedantic in the configuration
file.

-o, --no-override
Ignore all overrides provided by the package. This option will overrule
--show-overrides.

This option overrides the override variable in the configuration file.

--pedantic
Display pedantic ("P:") tags as well. They are normally suppressed. (This is
equivalent to -L "+=pedantic").

Pedantic tags are Lintian at its most pickiest and include checks for particular
Debian packaging styles and checks that many people disagree with. Expect false
positives and Lintian tags that you don't consider useful if you use this option.
Adding overrides for pedantic tags is probably not worth the effort.

This option overrides the pedantic variable in the configuration file.

Note: pedantic and display-level may not both appear in the configuration file.

--profile vendor[/prof]
Use the profile from vendor (or the profile with that name). If the profile name does
not contain a slash, the default profile for than vendor is chosen.

As an example, if you are on Ubuntu and want to use Lintian's Debian checks, you can
use:

--profile debian

Likewise, on a Debian machine you can use this to request the Ubuntu checks.

If the token {VENDOR} appears in the profile name, lintian will substitute the token
with a vendor name to find the profile. lintian uses Dpkg::Vendor to determine the
best vendor to use (the closer to the current vendor, the better). This is mostly
useful for people implementing their own checks on top of Lintian.

If not specified, the default value is {VENDOR}/main.

Please Refer to the Lintian User Manual for the full documentation of profiles.

--show-overrides
Controls whether tags that have been overridden should be shown.

--show-overrides will show overridden tags and mark them as overridden (using an "O"
code).

If the overridden tags are shown, the related override comments will also be displayed
(unless --quiet is used). Please refer to the Lintian User Manual for the
documentation on how lintian relates comments to a given override.

To negate it, i.e. suppress the showing of overridden tags, please use
--no-show-overrides.

This option overrides the show-overrides (or no-show-overrides) variable in the
configuration file.

--suppress-tags tag1,tag2,...
Suppress the listed tags. They will not be reported if they occur and will not affect
the exit status of Lintian. This option can be given multiple times and can be mixed
with --suppress-tags-from-file.

This option can be used together with --dont-check-part ("Not those checks nor these
tags") and --check-part ("Only those checks, but not these tags (from those checks)")
to further reduce the selection of tags.

When used with --tags, this option is mostly ignored.

--suppress-tags-from-file file
Suppress all tags listed in the given file. Blank lines and lines beginning with #
are ignored. All other lines are taken to be tag names or comma-separated lists of
tag names to suppress. The suppressed tags will not be reported if they occur and
will not affect the exit status of Lintian.

Tags parsed from the file will be handled as if they had been given to the
--suppress-tags option (e.g. ignored if --tags is used).

--tag-display-limit[=NUM]
By default, lintian limits itself to emitting at most 4 instances of each tag per
processable when STDOUT is a TTY. This option specifies that limit.

When STDOUT is not a TTY, lintian has no limit.

To disable the limit, please use a value of zero.

This option overrides the tag-display-limit variable in the configuration file.

Configuration options:

--cfg configfile
Read the configuration from configfile rather than the default locations. This option
overrides the LINTIAN_CFG environment variable.

--no-cfg
Do not read any configuration file. This option overrides the --cfg above.

--ignore-lintian-env
Ignore all environment variables starting with LINTIAN_.

This option is mostly useful for applications running lintian for checking packages
and do not want the invoking user to affect the result (by setting LINTIAN_PROFILE
etc.).

Note it does not cause lintian to ignore the entire environment like TMPDIR or
DEB_VENDOR. The latter can affect the default profile (or "{VENDOR}" token for
--profile).

Should usually be combined with --no-user-dirs (or unsetting $HOME and all XDG_
variables).

--include-dir dir
Use dir as an additional "LINTIAN_BASE". The directory is expected have a similar
layout to the LINTIAN_BASE (if it exists), but does not need to be a full self-
contained root.

lintian will check this directory for (additional) profiles, data files, support
libraries and checks. The latter two imply that Lintian may attempt to load and
execute code from this directory.

This option may appear more than once; each time adding an additional directory.
Directories are searched in the order they appear on the command line.

The additional directories will be checked after the user directories (though see
--no-user-dirs) and before the core LINTIAN_BASE.

Note: This option should be the very first if given.

-j X, --jobs=X
Set the limit for how many jobs Lintian will run in parallel. This option overrides
the jobs variable in the configuration file.

By default Lintian will use nproc to determine a reasonable default (or 2, if the
nproc fails).

--user-dirs, --no-user-dirs
By default, lintian will check $HOME and /etc for files supplied by the user or the
local sysadmin (e.g. config files and profiles). This default can be disabled (and
re-enabled) by using --no-user-dirs (and --user-dirs, respectively).

These options will not affect the inclusion of LINTIAN_BASE, which is always included.

These option can appear multiple times, in which case the last of them to appear
determines the result.

Note that if the intention is only to disable the user's $HOME, then unsetting $HOME
and XDG_*_HOME may suffice. Alternatively, /etc can be "re-added" by using
--include-dir (caveat: /etc/lintianrc will be ignored by this).

If the intention is to avoid (unintentional) side-effects from the calling user, then
this option could be combined with --ignore-lintian-env.

If for some reason --no-user-dirs cannot be used, then consider unsetting $HOME and
all the $XDG_* variables (not just the $XDG_*_HOME ones).

Note: This option should be the very first if given.

Developer/Special usage options:

--allow-root
Override lintian's warning when it is run with superuser privileges.

--packages-from-file X
The line is read as the path to a file to process (all whitespace is included!).

If X is "-", Lintian will read the packages from STDIN.

--perf-debug
Enable performance related debug logging to STDERR.

The data logged and the format used is subject to change with every release.

Note that some of the information may also be available (possibly in a different
format) with the --debug option.

FILES

Lintian looks for its configuration file in the following locations, in this order:

• The argument given to --cfg

• $LINTIAN_CFG

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lintian/lintianrc

• XDG_DIR/lintian/lintianrc

Where XDG_DIR is a directory listed in $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (or /etc/xdg if
$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is unset).

• $HOME/.lintianrc

Please consider using the XDG based variant above (usually, in ~/.config).

• /etc/lintianrc

Lintian uses the following directories:

/tmp
Lintian defaults to creating a temporary lab directory in /tmp. To change the
directory used, set the TMPDIR environment variable to a suitable directory. TMPDIR
can be set in the configuration file.

/usr/share/lintian/checks
Scripts that check aspects of a package.

/usr/share/lintian/collection
Scripts that collect information about a package and store it for use by the check
scripts.

/usr/share/lintian/data
Supporting data used by Lintian checks and for output formatting.

/usr/share/lintian/lib
Utility scripts used by the other lintian scripts.

For binary packages, Lintian looks for overrides in a file named
usr/share/lintian/overrides/<package> inside the binary package, where <package> is the
name of the binary package. For source packages, Lintian looks for overrides in
debian/source/lintian-overrides and then in debian/source.lintian-overrides if the first
file is not found. The first path is preferred. See the Lintian User's Manual for the
syntax of overrides.

CONFIGURATION FILE

The configuration file can be used to specify default values for some options. The
general format is:

option = value

All whitespace adjacent to the "=" sign as well as leading and trailing whitespace is
ignored. However whitespace within the value is respected, as demonstrated by this
example:

# Parsed as "opt1" with value "val1"
opt1 = val1
# Parsed as "opt2" with value "val2.1 val2.2 val2.3"
opt2 = val2.1 val2.2 val2.3

Unless otherwise specified, no option may appear more than once. Lintian will ignore
empty lines or lines starting with the #-character.

Generally options will be the long form of the command-line option without the leading
dashes. There some exceptions (such as --profile), where Lintian uses the same name as
the environment variable.

Lintian only allows a subset of the options specified in the configuration file; please
refer to the individual options in "OPTIONS".

In the configuration file, all options listed must have a value, even if they do not
accept a value on command line (e.g. --pedantic). The values "yes", "y", "1", or "true"
will enable such an option and "no", "n", "0" or "false" will disable it. Prior to the
2.5.2 release, these values were case sensitive.

For other options, they generally take the same values as they do on the command line.
Though some options allow a slightly different format (e.g. --display-level). These
exceptions are explained for the relevant options in "OPTIONS".

Beyond command line options, it is also allowed to specify the environment variable
"TMPDIR" in the configuration file.

A sample configuration file could look like:

# Sample configuration file for lintian
#
# Set the default profile (--profile)
LINTIAN_PROFILE = debian

# Set the default TMPDIR for lintian to /var/tmp/lintian
# - useful if /tmp is tmpfs with "limited" size.
TMPDIR = /var/tmp/lintian/

# Show info (I:) tags by default (--display-info)
# NB: this cannot be used with display-level
display-info=yes

# Ignore all overrides (--no-override)
# NB: called "override" in the config file
# and has inverted value!
override = no

# Automatically determine if color should be used
color = auto

EXIT STATUS

       0   Normal operation.

       1   Lintian run-time error. An error message is sent to stderr.

       2   Detected a condition specified via the --fail-on option. This can be used to trigger a
           non-zero exit value in case of policy violations.

CHECKING LAST BUILD

       When run in an unpacked package dir (with no package selection arguments), Lintian will
       use debian/changelog to determine the source and version of the package.  Lintian will
       then attempt to find a matching .changes file for this source and version combination.

       Lintian will (in order) search the following directories:

       ..  Used by dpkg-buildpackage(1).

       ../build-area
           Used by svn-buildpackage(1).

       /var/cache/pbuilder/result
           Used by pbuilder(1) and cowbuilder(1).

       In each directory, Lintian will attempt to find a .changes file using the following values
       as architecture (in order):

       $DEB_BUILD_ARCH (or dpkg --print-architecture)
           The environment variable DEB_BUILD_ARCH (if not set, "dpkg --print-architecture" will
           be used instead)

       $DEB_HOST_ARCH
           The environment variable DEB_HOST_ARCH.

       dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
           If dpkg(1) appears to support multi-arch, then any architecture listed by "dpkg
           --print-foreign-architectures" will be used (in the order returned by dpkg).

       multi
           Pseudo architecture used by mergechanges(1).

       all Used when building architecture indep packages only (e.g.  dpkg-buildpackage -A).

       source
           Used for "source only" builds (e.g. dpkg-buildpackage -S).

       If a .changes file matches any combination above exists, Lintian will process the first
       match as if you had passed it per command line.  If no .changes file can be found, Lintian
       will print a list of attempted locations on STDERR and exit 0.

EXAMPLES

       $ lintian foo.changes
           Check the changes file itself and any (binary, udeb or source) package listed in it.

       $ lintian foo.deb
           Check binary package foo given by foo.deb.

       $ lintian foo.dsc
           Check source package foo given by foo.dsc.

       $ lintian foo.dsc -L +info
           Check source package foo given by foo.dsc, including info tags.

       $ lintian -i foo.changes
           Check the changes file and, if listed, the source and binary package of the upload.
           The output will contain detailed information about the reported tags.

       $ lintian
           Assuming debian/changelog exists, look for a changes file for the source in the parent
           dir.  Otherwise, print usage information and exit.

BUGS

       Lintian does not have any locking mechanisms yet.  (Running several Lintian processes on
       the same laboratory simultaneously is likely to fail or corrupt the laboratory.)

       If you discover any other bugs in lintian, please contact the authors.

AUTHORS

       Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>

       Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>

       Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>

       Please use the email address <lintian-maint@debian.org> for Lintian related comments.