Hi Rob,

> I've pushed some updates to
> https://git.devuan.org/RobPearce/slim/src/branch/suites/unstable to
> clean up several of those lintian issues.

In the meantime policy 4.6.2.0 is out, so standards are 4.6.2 now ;)

> I'm still on a slightly older compat because when I set it to 13 it
> caused problems. I'll have a bit more of a dig there, now that I've
> reduced the list.

Please share what kind of problems?

> There's a couple of warnings relating to systemd/upstart which I'm
> not clear on the relevance of (they look like "you're not doing it
> the Debian systemd way" which would seem reasonable on Devuan) so
> I'm interested on comments on those.

Warnings about systemd can safely be ignored in a forked package. FWIW
I am not getting that warning when running lintian on ceres but I see
it when it is run inside the build chroot. Most probably because the
lintian template for Devuan does not get automatically installed there.

I am not sure about upstart - isn't it dead since 2014, maybe it is
safe to remove the config?

> I don't think I fully understand what the documentation is telling me
> about "hardening-no-bindnow" either.

One way is to add the following on top of debian/rules

export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS=hardening=+all

This type of hardening adds -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now to LDFLAGS and
there are facilities in lintian to detect if those were used from the
resulting binaries. There is very low chance that a really simple
binary does not exhibit those feats no matter that it was built using
the proper flags and lintian misdetects that it was not built with the
proper flags.

One of the most probable causes of this problem is not properly
propagating LDFLAGS through the various build system layers.

Another thing I would do with a package is:

wrap-and-sort --short-indent --wrap-always --sort-binary-packages --
trailing-comma

The point in this is to make diffs more manageable when things change.

While checking how the build goes, I made some changes, then it felt
stupid not to commit them... Feel free to cherry-pick what you like
from them: https://git.devuan.org/bbonev/slim

With best regards,
b.