[code-quality] Code-quality & PEP257

[Ian Cordasco]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Vladimir Keleshev
<vladimir at keleshev.com> wrote:
> Hi Ian,
>
> I'm actually on the mailing list as well (since maybe 2 weeks ago). You
> might remember my email about proposing a common format for error messages.
> I think it's a great idea to coordinate development of our static-analysis
> tools. Adding pep257 to flake8 might be a good idea. Shall we call it
> fla257ke8? :o)
>
> But I'm not sure I understand the purpose of flake8. Wouldn't having a
> common error format between all the tools defeat the purpose of flake8? Then
> a dummy runner would suffice. Imagine a world where all static analysis
> tools have a common output format and same command-line interface and error
> conventions.
>
> Cheers,
> Vladimir

Hey Vladimir,

I'm awful with names, so I apologize for not putting your post there
together with the fact you work on PEP257.

flake8 (as soon as we update to pyflakes 0.7 which was just announced)
will have a consistent error format. (Prior to 2.0, our vendored copy
of pyflakes provided column reporting which was just introduced in
pyflakes 0.7 and was missing in every official version prior to it.)
As for the purpose of flake8, it was created to run pep8 and pyflakes
and optionally check the McCabe complexity score. It is already
extensible to check naming conventions via pep8, so extending it (most
likely through an add-on) to check doc-strings would be a logical
step.

I'm not readily familiar with pep257's error reporting, but in
skimming over the code I noticed the Error class. I'm sure if we had
to, we could monkey patch your tool (as we already monkey patch
pyflakes), to standardize the output for flake8 users. Due to the fact
we can do that (and already do), I'm not sure attempting to make a
standard way to report errors, warnings, etc. is an immediate
priority. It's certainly something to consider, but we will encounter
the issue where tools are old enough to have other tools written to
parse their output. They could add options for different styles of
reporting, but if they're anything like pep8, they already have those
options which makes this a non-issue.

Anyway, I look forward to working with you on integrating pep257 into
flake8 and I hope to hear more from you.

Cheers,
Ian