[Buildbot-devel] Running Pylint on Buildbot's source code

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Vladimir Rutsky
<rutsky.vladimir at gmail.com> wrote:
> Buildbot have target to run Pylint on it's own source code in Makefile and
> have Pylint configuration file, so looks like Pylint used on Buildbot
> sources before.
>
> Right now running `make pylint` in Buildbot sources show a lot of style
> errors and as I see Pylint is not run periodically on
> http://buildbot.buildbot.net/
>
> Why Pylint usage was abandoned? It is very useful tool to keep source code
> visually clean.

We use pyflakes instead, which is a little less stringent, and focuses
on errors that may hide real bugs.  I know pylint is quite
configurable, so perhaps we could limit its scope rather severely?
For example, I don't care how many spaces appear before and after a {,
or between code and an end-of-line comment.  But I would like
something to check line length.

Most folks don't run pyflakes before submitting a pull request, which
leaves reviewers running pyflakes and deciding whether to fix the
results (usually something trivial like an unused import) or request
an update from the request submitter.  It would be wonderful to run
pylint or pyflakes (or both!) on every pull request, and tag the
result.  This would make it easier for those of us doing reviews to
see whether the code passes or not.  That gets back to the
oft-discussed but as-yet-not-implemented GitHub pull request status
plugin / change source.

One more point: we've still got two long-lived branches in play -
master and nine.  Applying a wide-ranging "cleanup" to just one of
those branches will make merging a nightmare.  So, when this does come
to pass, the cleanup will need to be applied to master, merged to nine
immediately, and then re-run on nine (to catch all of the new code in
nine).

Dustin