Hello,

I'm happy to announce you the release of Pylint 1.5.0, respectively Astroid 1.4.1.

It's been over a year since the last major release and the amount of changes that were brought into pylint in this time is humongous, with over 30 new checks and tons of bug fixes.

I would like to use this occasion for thanking for their contributions the new committers who joined pylint's team in the past months, ceridwen and Dmitry, as well as thanking the contributors that made this release possible.

Here are some of the major changes of this release:

- We finally support Python 3.5 in both projects.

- We stopped depending on logilab-common, which means that users of the popular testing framework pytest will finally stop being confused by having two executables with the same name doing different things.

- Almost 30 new checks you might enjoy not having in your project. These checks fall into multiple categories, regarding maintainability, readability, recommendations for improving the code, as well as new type-checking capabilities. They are:

'wrong-import-order', 'ungrouped-imports', 'wrong-import-position', 'unneeded-not', 'simplifiable-if-condition', 'too-many-boolean-expressions' 'too-many-nested-blocks', 'multiple-imports', 'duplicate-except', 'using-constant-test', 'confusing-with-statement', 'singleton-comparison', 'misplaced-comparison-constant', 'consider-using-enumerate', 'nonlocal-and-global', 'continue-in-finally', 'misplaced-bare-raise', 'nonlocal-without-binding', 'yield-inside-async-function', 'too-many-star-expressions', 'invalid-star-assignment-target', 'import-star-module-level, 'star-needs-assignment', 'unexpected-special-method-signature', 'repeated-keyword'.

Some new type checks for finding violations of the type system are 'unsubscriptable-object', 'unsupported-membership-test', 'not-an-iterable', 'not-context-manager', 'not-async-context-manager', 'duplicate-bases' and 'inconsistent-mro'.

- We also added a new 'extensions' component, which contains optional checkers that needs to be activated explicitly.

These includes 'extensions.check_docs', which verifies a bunch of properties of the docstrings, such as checking that all function, method and constructor parameters are mentioned in the params and types part of the docstring. Also, it checks that there are no naming inconsistencies between the signature and the documentation, i.e. also report documented parameters that are missing in the signature. This is important to find cases where parameters are renamed only in the code, not in the documentation.

Activate this checker with:

--load-plugins=pylint.extensions.check_docs

Most of the work was put into astroid though, which got more capable in this period of time. Unfortunately, more than half of the work that went into it was postponed for astroid 1.6 and astroid 2.0, since it wasn't deemed stable enough for this release. New features worth mentioning are:

- Python 3.5 support

- some of the nodes were renamed in order to be more similar to builtin's ast module, such as Class to ClassDef, Function to FunctionDef Getattr to Attribute etc, the old names being slated for removal in astroid 2.0. This affects the plugins as well, since it means that the visit methods should use the new names instead (so visit_classdef for class). Old names are still supported in visit methods for a while, until pylint 2.0. Activating the warnings when running should result in spurious PendingDeprecationWarnings when using the old node names.

- add proper grammatical names for `infered` and `ass_type` methods, namely `inferred` and `assign_type`.

The old methods will raise PendingDeprecationWarning, being slated for removal in astroid 2.0.

- we added a new convenience API, `astroid.parse`, which can be used to retrieve an astroid AST from a source code string, similar to how ast.parse can be used to obtain a Python AST from a source string.

- There's a new separate step for transforms.

Until now, the transforms were applied at the same time the tree was being built. This was problematic if the transform functions were using inference, since the inference was executed on a partially constructed tree, which led to failures when post-building information was needed.

- Better support for understanding builtins.

We're understanding a bunch of new builtins, but unfortunately most of them weren't released, since they weren't stable enough for now, due to some inherent problems that astroid has. The most important that's released though is the understanding of super, which means that we can now detect problems of sort:

class A(B, C, D): def __init__(self): super(A, self).call_missing_method()

You can read the complete changelog here https://bitbucket.org/logilab/astroid/raw/4f45b6fc4c23b80b4f7154add1b9d9cee3... and https://bitbucket.org/logilab/pylint/raw/2871c4d7084478b5db02f384e4e5167641c...

Now with every release there's going to be new false positives or regressions or things that could be improved. Don't hesitate to open an issue or to send a PR if you notice something's amiss and we'll try to have new bug fix releases as soon as possible (you might have noticed that's astroid 1.4.1..)

As a final note, we're planning to switch to GitHub soon, which will mean an improved CI for us, resulting in less maintenance pain.

Thank you for reading all this and enjoy pylinting!

Claudiu