rpmlint

rpmlint is a tool for checking common errors in RPM packages. rpmlint can be used to test individual packages before uploading or to check an entire distribution.

rpmlint can check binary RPMs, source RPMs, and plain specfiles, but all checks do not apply to all argument types. For best check coverage, run rpmlint on source RPMs instead of plain specfiles.

The idea for rpmlint is from the lintian tool of the Debian project. All the checks reside in rpmlint/checks folder. Feel free to provide new checks and suggestions at:

https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpmlint

Install

For installation on your machine you will need the following packages:

Mandatory:

• Python 3.6 or newer
• python3-setuptools, python3-toml, python3-pyxdg
• rpm and its python bindings
• readelf, cpio, gzip, bzip and xz

Optional:

• libmagic and its python bindings
• groff and gtbl
• enchant and its python bindings
• appstream-util, part of appstream-glib

Testing

Docker

If you want to test the rpmlint when developing best is to use podman to provide the environment for you. There are various distribution dockerfiles in test/ folder.

I.e. if you want to test on the latest openSUSE you can test using the following commands:

podman build -t opensusetw -f test/Dockerfile-opensusetw .

podman run -v $(pwd):/usr/src/rpmlint/ opensusetw python3 setup.py test

Directly

Another option is to run the tests on your system directly. If you have all the required modules as listed on the Install section above. You will also need pytest and pytest-cov and pytest-flake8.

If all the dependencies are present you can just execute tests using:

python3 setup.py test

Or even pick one of the tests using pytest:

python3 -m pytest test/test_config.py

Bugfixing and contributing

Any help is, of course, welcome but honestly most probable cause for your visit here is that rpmlint is marking something as invalid while it shouldn't or it is marking something as correct while it should not either :)

Now there is an easy way how to fix that. Our testsuite simply needs an extension to take the above problem into the account.

Primarily we just need the offending rpm file (best the smallest you can find or we would soon take few GB to take a checkout) and some basic expectation of what should happen.

Example workflow

1. I have rpmfile that should report unreadable zip file
2. I store this file in git under test/binary/texlive-codepage-doc-2018.151.svn21126-38.1.noarch.rpm
3. Now I need to figure out what check should test this, in this case test_zip.py
4. For the testing I will have to devise a small function that validates my expectations:

@pytest.mark.parametrize('package', ['binary/texlive-codepage-doc'])
def test_zip2(tmpdir, package, zipcheck):
    output, test = zipcheck
    test.check(get_tested_package(package, tmpdir))
    out = output.print_results(output.results)
    assert 'W: unable-to-read-zip' in out

As you can see it is not so hard and with each added test we get better coverage on what is really expected from rpmlint and avoid naughty regressions in the long run.

Configuration

If you want to change configuration options or the list of checks you can use the following locations:

/etc/xdg/rpmlint/*config

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rpmlint/*config

The configuration itself is a toml file where for some basic inspiration you can check up rpmlint/configdefaults.toml which specifies format/defaults.

Additional option to control rpmlint behaviour is the addition of rpmlintrc file which uses old syntax for compatibility with old rpmlint releases, yet it can be normal toml file if you wish:

setBadness('check', 0)

addFilter('test-i-ignore')