Ruarí's thoughts

The package quality issue is an interesting one. What seems to be happening here is that Software Center now runs Lintian against local packages before installing them and if any errors are found it reports this message. For those unfamiliar with it, Lintian is a nice tool to help package maintainers make good Debian packages and is something we use internally. In the case of Opera there are 4 "errors". Now you might wonder why we didn't catch these errors ourself and fix them. Actually we did know about each of them but in all four cases the errors are not really errors. Lintian as great as it is, is more of a guide. It is not a perfect system, it makes mistakes and occasionally reports false positives. When package maintainers notice "errors" that aren't really errors they have the option to override them by putting an entry in a lintian override file stored within the package. We have done this for all 4 of our errors, along with comments about why we think they are not something we need to fix.

The problem with Software Center however, is it does not consider overrides at all. It wrongly makes the assumption that Lintian is perfect and hence no package should have any errors. To see how flawed this is consider that one of the errors in the Opera package is due to the fact that Lintian thinks that our primary copyright/license file is the LGPL (purely because it is fairly long and contains the words LGPL) and hence complains that our doc directory is the wrong place to store this file (we should point to the system installed LGPL instead). However, obviously our software is not licensed under the LGPL so this is simply a false match. So what will do? We'll find ways to work around the non-errors such that Lintian doesn't complain.

I will add however, that I think this is the wrong way to use Lintian. A good demonstration of this is that many of the packages installed in Ubuntu by default have such errors. For example Firefox shares one of our errors (about embedding sqlite, rather than linking to the system version). Software Center however doesn't test packages from the repositories, only locally installed packages. Why is it holding external packages to a higher standard that ones provided by the system?

The second issue is simply a bug in our Gtk3 skinning. As many of you know Opera can use Gtk or Qt/KDE libs to look native even though we are neither a Gtk nor Qt application. It seems however that a recent update to Gtk3 and the primary theme in Ubuntu (Ambiance) exposes a flaw in skinning system. However, we should have plenty of time to get to the bottom of it.

The summary of all this? Don't worry 12.10 on 12.10 will work by the time they are both ready for release!