For style-changes (such as pep8/flake8) elements, I find that very often new contributors don't know they can configure their text editors to display the pep8/pyflakes violations. Very often, it is a question of mentoring them through the process of configuring their text editors.

This seems like the kind of thing we can document in our contributor guide?

http://scikit-image.org/docs/stable/contribute.html#stylistic-guidelines

That seems a fairly sensible place to document this :) But considering this affect many projects in the scipy community, I am wondering if we should not try to combine efforts and link to a common page somewhere on the web (maybe hosted on the scipy-lecture notes website?) I am happy to work on this, either for scikit-image specifically or to create the webpage somewhere else then edit the scikit-image contribution guidelines to link to this document.

Good idea; and thanks!

I just got the approval from Gael to add a chapter "Best development practices" to scipy lecture notes. That should cover setting up text editors and other elements. If you have any other ideas on what should be in that chapter, just email me. Cheers, N

Stéfan