Lintian User's Manual

Abstract

This manual describes Lintian, the Debian package checker.

Copyright Notice

Copyright ©1998 Christian Schwarz and Richard Braakman Copyright ©2000 Sean 'Shaleh' Perry

This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Contents

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 About Lintian
  • 1.2 The intention of Lintian
  • 1.3 Design issues
  • 1.4 Disclaimer
• 2 Getting started
  • 2.1 Installing Lintian
  • 2.2 Running lintian
  • 2.3 Lintian Tags
  • 2.4 Overrides
• 3 Advanced usage
  • 3.1 How Lintian works
  • 3.2 The laboratory
  • 3.3 Distribution directory