launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 8:21 PM, Gavin Panella
<gavin.panella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 14 June 2011 01:55, Robert Collins <robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [...]
>> So, I'd like to propose we do something other projects do: restrict
>> lint to reporting on functional issues, and use an idempotent pretty
>> printer to reformat our code automatically.
>
> Do you have a pretty printer in mind? 30 seconds on Google didn't turn
> up anything.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/PythonTidy is one; I haven't done a
comprehensive search as yet.

>> We would add a post-commit hook in pqm that would reformat the changed
>> files using the pretty printer, and we'd no longer need to spend any
>> time thinking or worrying about formatting.
>
> I think that's a neat idea. but the pretty printer has to be
> completely trustworthy. The moment it makes one wrong assumption
> (*that we notice*) about what was intended we'll all be trying to
> learn the tricks and intricacies of the pretty printer instead of just
> writing code that others can read.

I don't follow this. There are two failure modes in pretty printers:
 a) cosmetic
 b) functional

If its a functional bug, we're going to notice when buildbot blows up on us.

if its a cosmetic bug, it will be consistent - but we don't need to
worry about matching the pretty printer ourselves - anything we do
different it will fixup-as-we-land.

> On the whole, I think I'd prefer to silence the less useful warnings
> from the linter (like 2 spaces before an inline comment, and blank
> lines around locally defined functions).
>
> I'd also just prefer to know that what landed was what I wrote and
> what was reviewed.

Why? I'm not trying to troll - it genuinely doesn't seem like a useful
thing to spend neurons on.

-Rob