The lintian harness could be made more usable for Debian derivatives, and generally.

Lintian comes with a "harness", a script that runs lintian on all (new) packages in an archive. It is not included in the lintian package, and needs to be run from the source tree. Its output is highly Debian branded, and assumes all interesting packages are in one archive ("main" for Debian). Additionally, the harness currently requires filesystem access to a Debian mirror.

This spec proposes that the harness be fixed so that it works as a standalone tool, its output can be easily branded to the distribution that uses it, and so that HTTP access to a mirror is sufficient.