rpmlint improvements

Alexander Todorov atodorov at redhat.com
Sat Sep 25 09:10:29 UTC 2010


Kamil Paral wrote:
... skip ...
> The policy might look like: Every line whitelisting an Error message must
> be sponsored by some different package maintainer. On the other hand,
> Warning and Info messages might be whitelisted without restrictions.
> 
> That's only one example of a possible policy, certainly there is plenty
> of solutions.
> 

Hi Kamil,
sorry for late reply, I'm on the road this and next week.

Originally I've thought about having the whitelist config define inside the
individual packages but RHEL rpmlint maintainer didn't like the idea (not quite
sure why).

I totally agree that starting with per-package config is easier and will help
upstream adoption. However the policy needs to be strict. Info messages are not
worth filtering imho since they can provide some useful clues to the package
maintainer or the QE person - for example rpm gpg key not installed. Warnings
probably also need a review or just left as-is. Sometimes that can indicate
unexpected changes in the packaging which may or may not be errors.

Probably allow to whitelist only error messages.


> 
> Of course, having this feature upstream would be much better for us. The
> package maintainers should see the same output when they run rpmlint locally
> as they see when rpmlint is run inside autoqa. That is possible only when
> rpmlint upstream supports these whitelists definitions directly.
> 

It's on my todo list to play with the rpmconfig files to see how that works. If
we can have something like rpmlint.d/package.conf that will do the trick. I
think this could be supported right now but need to test it though, haven't tried.

... skip ...

> For example you don't just define "don't show me the line that warns
> me about incorrect permissions on /etc/passwd", but you also define *what 
> the correct permissions are*. Per package.
>

I keep my vote for having this kind of definition. We not only want to filter
out the error on /etc/passwd (or whatever) not having standard permissions but
we also need to know what they should be (that applies mostly for RHEL).


I'll give a try of the whitelist feature and having per package config this week
and share my results.

Regards,
Alexander.


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