Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 17, 2011

I've made cleanup in Gammu documentation and the only place where to look for it is now The Gammu Manual. Reason for this is simple - single documentation format allows easy cross-referencing and is easier to maintain than mixed sources we used to have before. Thanks to using Sphinx it is possible to generate various outputs, you can see the HTML version on the website, you can download PDF variants and the same source is being used for generating man pages.

PS: You can find more details on generating other formats in the documentation.

Every time I review some package for sponsoring, I usually end up suggesting to fix some of more picky things which lintian finds. It looks like everybody is using default set of checks and does not look at others. Indeed the defaults tell about things which are really errors or need override, but --pedantic and --display-info show also useful hints. However you need to take them more as a suggestions than as a errors.

What I usually find interesting is --pedantic, because it tells about several things, which might be good idea to have in your package. Missing Homepage in debian/control is one of them and I believe this should exist for every package which has a homepage.

The --display-info (or just -I) is also useful, for example it does spell checking of texts in binaries and man pages. Registration into doc-base is also useful integration into the system and you should definitely do it if the package provides documentation in HTML.

To run these checks every time, you can create alias in your ~/.bashrc:

alias lintian='lintian -I --pedantic'