On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:10:18 +0000 James Laska jlaska@redhat.com wrote:

I've been playing around with a side project of using pychecker to provide early warning of typos/thinkos and questionable practices. I'm basically looking for many of the benefits that a compiler provides when it can't resolve find a variable/class/function name etc...

I've got the right mix of pychecker cmdline args such that the subset of issues is now manageable. But I'm curious if folks have any general thoughts on this subject.

What are your best practices?

Are there other similar tools out there?

Have any experiences to share or words of caution/wisdom?

Hey James,

I've been using pylint for a while and I must say it's pretty useful. It takes a while though to tune some of the tests - like * every variable has to be at least 3 chars (except for i when iterating), so often used 'id' won't pass as well as common for l in lines, for k,v in dict.iteritems() and such

* pylint complains about nonexisting properties if you override the __getattr__ method.

* in default * and ** magic is now allowed (from foo import *, def bar(*args, **kwargs), which is sometimes very useful

But it has pretty good documentation, commented config file and you can tune the checks using comments in the .py files themselves to disable a check for a file or even a block of code as simply as for example '# pylint: disable-msg=C0103' to disable warning about module variable in lowercase.

As I mentioned, you really have to take the time to configure it to your standart. As some people prefer to use CamelCase, some use_underline. After that is helps you keep the same standart throughout the whole project. And writing your own tests (plugins) is easy and fun :)

HTH, /David