debuild runs lintian twice

[Reuben Thomas]

When building a Debian package on Ubuntu, it's necessary to use "--profile debian" with lintian.

When using debuild, it should be possible to pass options to lintian with "--lintian-opts". However, these seem to be ignored currently: when lintian is run, options passed with --lintian-opts are not given to lintian.

As a workaround, one can use the dpkg-buildpackage option "--check-option", thus:

  debuild -us -uc --check-option="--profile=debian"

The --profile option is then passed to lintian (note the "="; it would also be possible to use the more verbose "--check-option=--profile --check-option=debian").

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: devscripts 2.20.2ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-42.46-generic 5.4.44
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-42-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.8
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Sun Sep 6 13:17:45 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-12-23 (258 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20190805)
SourcePackage: devscripts
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-08-29 (7 days ago)

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

On further investigation, what actually seems to happen is that lintian is run twice: once by dpkg-buildpackage, and once by debuild. Thus, the full incantation required is:

  debuild -us -uc --check-option="--profile=debian" --lintian-opts --profile debian

The reason I didn't notice is that omitting the second set (so that lintian run by debuild gives an error) does not cause debuild to exit with an error.

In any case, I guess lintian should not be run twice.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.