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0 pointsvlovich1234y ago0 comments

The problem with automatic linting is that there’s no good answer. Either you just fail and ask the user to resubmit or you fix up the formatting on their behalf. If you do the latter, you’re likely also pushing to the review system meaning the code under review and your local version no longer match which causes problems when rebasing and whatnot. The secondary problem is that the lint tool chain running locally sometimes doesn’t version match what’s in CI which poses a set of problems too, although in practice I think that’s raised as a concern only by teams that don’t establish good hygiene of checking in the set of tools (maintenance of multiple platforms is real there though).

I’ve yet to see a good answer to this problem though as each approach has upsides/downsides and no one ever ends up happy in a large enough team. Good luck.

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joatmon-snoo4y ago

Thanks for the feedback! All of those are very real problems and we've spent a lot of time thinking about how to handle them:

> Either you just fail and ask the user to resubmit or you fix up the formatting on their behalf.

We only apply autofixes when running on the user's machine; when running on CI, as you point out, we only show them because of Git's decentralized nature here.

> The secondary problem is that the lint tool chain running locally sometimes doesn’t version match what’s in CI which poses a set of problems too, although in practice I think that’s raised as a concern only by teams that don’t establish good hygiene of checking in the set of tools (maintenance of multiple platforms is real there though).

We've built out our own system for managing (mostly) hermetic toolchain installs, and require users to version their linters in their trunk.yaml configuration right now. (There are some open questions here around how we handle version skew between our toolchain version and the system-installed toolchain version.)

We're also well aware of the problems that emerge as you scale to a larger team; hierarchical configs are one of the things that we've discussed but are waiting until we have more traction to flesh out. (All of us working on the linter side have experience setting tech direction for orgs of 100+ engineers).

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