[Python-Dev] How is the GitHub workflow working for people?

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Feb 21 22:27:53 EST 2018


Where I work we have some teams using flake8 and some teams that use
pylint, and while pylint is more thorough, it is also slower and pickier,
and the general sense is to strongly prefer flake8.

I honestly expect that running either with close-to-default flags on stdlib
code would be a nightmare, and I wouldn't want *any* directives for either
one to appear in stdlib code, ever.

In some ideal future all code would just be reformatted before it's checked
in -- we're very far from that, and I used to be horrified by the very
idea, but in the Go world this is pretty much standard practice, and the
people at work who are using it are loving it. So I'm trying to have an
open mind about this. But there simply isn't a tool that does a good enough
job of this.

What I was thinking of was a much weaker option like tabnanny.py by Tim
Peters (still in the stdlib!), but I don't know whether this is feasible.

What we need now is not more opinions on which formatter or linter is best.
We need someone to actually do some work and estimate how much code would
be changed if we ran e.g. tabnanny.py (or something more advanced!) over
the entire stdlib, how much code would break (even the most conservative
formatter sometimes breaks code that wasn't expecting to be reformatted --
e.g. we used to have tests with significant trailing whitespace), and how
often the result would be just too ugly to look at. If you're not willing
to work on that, please don't respond to this thread.

--Guido

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 7:03 PM, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 2:19 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> > On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:22, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm willing to reconsider if there's a good enough tool. Ditto for C
> code (or do we already do it for C?).
> >
> > For Python code, flake8 --possibly with our own custom plugins— is the
> way to go.
>
> Is flake8 that much better than pylint, that pylint wouldn't even be
> discussed?
>
> pylint does warn about some relatively unimportant things out of the
> box, but it can be configured to ignore (almost?) everything it
> checks.
>
> I've been editing Python code in vim with syntastic.  I have syntastic
> set up to run pyflakes, pycodestyle and pydocstyle.  And I have a
> macro that saves the buffer, shells out and runs "make" with the
> default rule - and that default rule almost always does a
> whole-program pylint.
>
> It's possible to make pylint check just one file from syntastic, but I
> don't do that because it's too slow on large files.
>
> I've gotten the impression that pylint can detect some errors that
> pyflakes misses.  Not sure about flake8.
>
> I do like it that flake8 has a mccabe check.  pylint doesn't appear to
> have that, and instead relies on things like "too many statements",
> "too many branches" and "too many variables".
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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