Bug#745877: lintian: Unreasonable performance of detect_privacy_breach for clhep-doc/2.1.3.1-1/all

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Control: severity -1 serious

Hi,

I noticed a similar complaint today - this time about gcc.
 * I believe the performance of this check to be inadequate and a
   disservice to Lintian's users.
   - With (what remains of) my Lintian maintainer hat, I consider this
     unsuitable for release.
 * I intend to revert / disable the checks within 14 days if they have
   not been improved considerable before then.
   - My best efforts[1] has been an improvement, but I still find it no
     where near acceptable performance.


The "files"-check of libgcj-doc in 2.5.22.1 has a runtime of 1356s -
that is 22 minutes!  Even with our partial fix in the master branch, it
is /only/ reduced to 605s or ~10 minutes!

For comparison, I have made this little table to show the impact since
2.5.19 (the last version without the "privacy"-breaker tags):

          Wall-time      Relative to 2.5.19
master     21m 30s           216%
2.5.22.1   36m 19s           364%
2.5.19      9m 57s           100%

~Niels

[1] commit 60dcea84c2d5bbc4c2eb98c1361700d6e2c97ca6
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=lintian/lintian.git;a=commitdiff;h=60dcea84c2d5bbc4c2eb98c1361700d6e2c97ca6