Lintian User's Manual

Copyright © 1998 Christian Schwarz, Richard Braakman

Copyright © 2000 Sean 'Shaleh' Perry

Copyright © 2004, 2008 Frank Lichtenheld

This manual describes Lintian, the Debian package checker.

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 the GNU web site. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Table of 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
2.4.1. Format of override files
2.4.2. Documenting overrides
2.4.3. Architecture specific overrides
2.5. Vendor Profiles
2.5.1. Rules for profile names and location
2.5.2. Profile syntax and semantics
2.6. Vendor specific data files
2.6.1. Load paths and order
2.6.2. Basic syntax of data files
3. Advanced usage
3.1. How Lintian works
3.2. The laboratory
  Next
  Introduction