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

[Eric Snow]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 9:30 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> My experience on pip is that automated style review is helpful for
> avoiding debates over subjective details.

This is the allure of Go's official linting tools.  Nobody is happy
with *all* the style choices but there isn't any room to fuss about it
so people don't.  Without that overhead, folks are more apt to lint
their changes.  (At least, that was my experience after several years
working on projects written in Go.)  One nice thing is that it frees
you up to argue about other things. :)

> But it does result in a
> certain level of "tweak to satisfy the style checker" churn in PRs.
> That can be frustrating when CI takes a long time to run.

I had exactly that experience on one particularly large Go project (on
GitHub, with slow CI, driven by bots).  To make matters worse, the
project had a dozen people actively working on it, meaning a high
potential that your PR would not apply cleanly if you took too long to
merge it.  So, coupled with slow CI, linting failures were
particularly onerous.  We all got in the habit of locally running the
linter frequently.  IIRC, I even set up VIM to run the linter whenever
I saved.

FWIW, I'm fine with a bot that leaves a message (or a review) if there
are linting issues.  Regardless, we should careful about adding any
extra overhead to our workflow, particularly since the move to GH has
been driven by the desire to reduce overhead.

-eric