PyChecker messages

[Frans Englich]

Hello,

I take PyChecker partly as an recommender of good coding practice, but I 
cannot make sense of some of the messages. For example:

runner.py:878: Function (main) has too many lines (201)

What does this mean? Cannot functions be large? Or is it simply an advice that 
functions should be small and simple?


runner.py:200: Function (detectMimeType) has too many returns (11)

The function is simply a long "else-if" clause, branching out to different 
return statements. What's wrong? It's simply a "probably ugly code" advice?


A common message is these:

runner.py:41: Parameter (frame) not used

But I'm wondering if there's cases where this cannot be avoided. For example, 
this signal handler:

#-------------------------------------------
def signalSilencer( signal, frame ):
    """
    Dummy signal handler for avoiding ugly
    tracebacks when the user presses CTRL+C.
    """
    print "Received signal", str(signal) + ", exiting."
    sys.exit(1)
#-------------------------------------------

_must_ take two arguments; is there any way that I can make 'frame' go away?


Also, another newbie question: How does one make a string stretch over several 
lines in the source code? Is this the proper way?

print "asda asda asda asda asda asda " \
	"asda asda asda asda asda asda " \
	"asda asda asda asda asda asda"


Thanks in advance,

		Frans

PS. Any idea how to convert any common time type to W3C XML Schema datatype 
duration?