While we are waiting for Lintian 2.5.0~rc3, here is a little update on what you can look forward to.

About a week ago I had the pleasure of merging my branch into the Lintian master branch. While the IRC bot DOS'ed the #debian-qa channel[SRY], cross-package checks became part of the official Lintian.

Beyond the reduced amount of binary-without-manpage false-positives, circular-dependency checking and a partial broken symlink detector, the 2.5.0~rc3 release will also feature java and multiarch checks (kudos to Vincent Fourmond and Steve R. Langasek, respectively).

The new java checks are based on the Java Policy and currently mostly covers checking for possibly build misconfigurations (jars without class files etc.), weird classpaths and missing Main-Class/depends on jarwrapper for executable jars. Note that #539315 has not been fixed, so executable jars will still trigger a warning.

For people wanting to upgrade their libraries to multiarch, Lintian will have a check to see if you remember the Pre-Depends on multiarch-support. Personally I have not followed the progress of multiarch too closely, but last I checked multiarch-support was not in unstable. I guess we are ahead on this one. :)

Other highlights include "dont install stuff in /run", armhf support, less false positive on missing B-D on dh_python{2,3} and recognition of 3.9.2 as the latest version of the Policy Manual.

I am also planning on starting a new branch and this time I intend to work on Vendor-based customization of Lintian. If you have any ideas/suggestions, by all means follow up on the thread on the Lintian list.

[SRY] Sorry to anyone present in the channel!