[Python-ideas] A proliferation of (un-)Pythonically programmatic pragmas

[Barry Warsaw]

I love many of the ancillary tools that help improve the quality of my
Python code, including flake8, coverage, and mypy.  Each of these
usually produces some great diagnostics, but none of them are perfect,
so they also produce false positives that have to be suppressed.

Each of these tools supports "pragmas", i.e. comments you can add to a
line of code to suppress a warning.  E.g. with flake8 I can say:

    import readline, rlcompleter        # noqa: F401

to suppress the flake8 warnings about unused imports.  These modules
work by side-effect, which of course a static analyzer can't know.

Similarly, when mypy complains about a line it's confused on, I can add
a comment to suppress the useless warning:

try:
    from pathlib import Path, PurePath
except ImportError:
    from pathlib2 import Path, PurePath      # type: ignore

And when I want to boost coverage, but I know that some lines aren't
covered under some versions of Python, I can do something like:

            self.send_error(HTTPStatus.NOT_FOUND)   # pragma: nocover

These are all well and good until I have to *combine* suppressions.
E.g. in the pathlib2 pragma to mypy, I also get a flake8 warning and
I've tried just about every combination of pragma comment I can think
of, but I've not been able to make both tools happy.  I've resorted to
refactoring the code into an entire module for flake8 to ignore and added:

    # flake8: noqa

to suppress all warnings in the file.  I actually have hit on a few
places where I need to suppress warnings from all three tools on the
same line, and I basically can't do it.

The specifics aren't as important as the general use case: multiple
tools competing for the same valuable real-estate.

I have no ideas how to improve the situation, and of course any solution
would involve some coordination between all of these tools, but it's
beginning to feel like a losing battle.  Is there a better way?

Cheers,
-Barry