Without enabling all of the checks that we want enforced, we cannot expect new code to achieve that standard, as it will not be caught by the integration scripts. Sure, not every check needs to be turned on, so the broader question here is what standards do the CHIRP developers care to enforce. Obviously, I think docstrings should be mandatory, thus I added a placeholder.
I care far more about people that write drivers, add features to drivers, or fix bugs in drivers. A lot of those contributions come from people that aren't going to tolerate a high level of obsession over things that appear trivial to them. Since I'm not going to bring myself to reject their very useful and functional patch because of such a missing thing, if I enforce it before commit, then I have to do the work to fix them up each time.
I agree with Dan. I'm not a college educated programmer. I don't do software coding for a living. I build most of my patches by searching through the existing drivers to see how others have done what I want to do.
I'm sort of in a holding pattern right now to see how this shakes out. The 2+ years or so that I have been contributing to CHIRP has been done as a hobby. I enjoy doing it. If it becomes more like a job, then I'll have to move on and do some of the long list of other things I could enjoy doing.
I think that if CHIRP is changed to where someone like me (without professional programming skills) can't get started like I did, then the pool of volunteer programmers will be more like a puddle. My 2 cents.
Jim KC9HI