What is "lintian"

Lintian is a helper tool used in conjunction with [[dpkg]], the Debian package management system. It checks Debian software packages for common inconsistencies and errors. As of Mar. 16th 2012, the latest version complies to Debian standards version 3.9.3.

In 2009, the Debian FTP masters announced that they would use Lintian to automatically reject packages uploaded to Debian. They acknowledged that some of the issues diagnosed by Lintian had rare exceptions, which could be overridden by the maintainer. The idea to use Lintian as an automatic rejection mechanism was proposed already in 1998 by Christian Schwarz, when he announced the creation of Lintian.

Linda was another application that was intended to overcome many difficulties with lintian. It was written in Python and was faster than current versions of Lintian. However, Lintian was better known and underwent many fixes to overcome past difficulties.