In addition to the things that can be determined about Debian related files just by examining them, as documented on the debian metadata page, there is lots of useful additional analysis that can run on them and the results made available in FOSSology. This page keeps track of potential projects and ideas.
lintian analysis:
lintian is the main debian package QA tool, it checks packages for compliance with Debian policy, common bugs, and tons of things. It's output is in a nice parsable format that could be easily injected into a FOSSology table. lintian has checks for both binary and source packages. Both the Debian and Ubuntu projects maintain central services that run lintian on all packages in their archives. FOSSology could run lintian on packages it finds and make the results available via the UI in interesting ways.
piuparts:
piuparts is the “package installation, upgrading and removal testing suite”. piuparts is for testing binary packages.Debian maintains a central piuparts service for all packages in it's archives. FOSSology could run piuparts on all binary packages it finds and make the results available via the UI in interesting ways.
compile testing: source packages that are encountered could be test compiled in various releases (using something like pbuilder) and the results could be made available. The Debian and Ubuntu projects maintain “build daemon” machines that build all new source packages uploaded for their archives and make build results and logs available. See
buildd.net and
buildd.debian.org for examples. In addition to the normal build daemons, there are several projects which periodically attempt to recompile the entire archive to look for problems.
: find urls
FTBFS: fails to build from source (the package doesn't build due to missing dependency declaration or other bugs). For a FOSSology user analysing their own software, it might be good to know if it doesn't build in particular environments.
double compile support: once the source package is unpacked and built, can it be built again from the same unpacked tree?
build with newer GCC: will the debian packages build with a particular version of GCC? This is more a test for if an upcoming version of GCC has an regressions, but also uncovers bugs in packages. (Martin Michlmayr often heads this up)
