On 03/08/2015 07:53 AM, Dan Smith wrote:
I'd like to get a feeling from others about how valuable they think it is to have a bunch of change to get pylint happy. Personally, I abandoned this work a while ago being ever more frustrated with pylint in a lot of areas. Having used it (or specifically not used it) in other large projects since, I think it's value is extremely limited. For example, it will likely be hopelessly confused by bitwise and any code that uses it. I've seen it employed most usefully in a situation where it is simply used against a specific patch to try to gauge whether it "makes things worse or not".
FWIW, I have patches to de-lint bitwise_grammar.py and bitwise.py, and I think the changes are uniformly beneficial to the code. So far, pylint has had no troubles with bitwise code that weren't rooted in other legitimate issues. The most widespread problem has been the lack of docstrings. Maybe it has matured since you last used it?
Unless we pick things we care about specifically for a whitelist of issues, I'd rather not see another hundred or so patches to try to trivially appease pylint.
I have already eliminated a half-dozen of its checks, because it's just too pedantic (or redundant/conflicting with pep8). I am continuing to tweak the pylintrc file, because I heartily agree that it's far too much to expect 100% conformance to its stock configuration. Nevertheless, pylint's complaints seem less trivial than pep8's.
It gets a solid endorsement from me, because it has already flagged some real errors in the code that need to be fixed. Indeed, I was originally skeptical that it would be worthwhile, since we already comply with pep8; however, these results made me think that it can be tuned to yield significant ongoing value for this project.
At this point, I have almost a dozen patches in my tree, and I think that they add enough value (e.g. docstrings) to justify their inclusion (independent of the fact that they yield pylint compliance). I am working to clean up my stack and post what I have for consideration. As such, please reserve judgment until you see that series hit the list.