[code-quality] Include content of other files in a ConfigFile input (was: Searching multiple setup.cfg files for flake8 section?)

[Ben Finney]

Ian Cordasco <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com>
writes:

> On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 2:11 PM, Willy Wu <wwu at dropbox.com> wrote:
> > So our flake8 might be a simpler case, where our lint tool invokes
> > flake8 on every file in the diff individually rather than a bunch of
> > files at once. Am I right to guess that if you do "flake8 .", then
> > flake8 picks a single per-project config file to apply across all
> > files?
>
> Like I said, we do not change how flake8 behaves whether its running
> against a lot of files or whether it's running against a single file.

That is correct behaviour, in my view.

The handling of multiple files for configuration should not be special
to each tool that reads those files. Instead, it should be part of the
specification for the configuration format.

> When running flake8, it looks in the current working directory for a
> config file to apply to all files that it then discovers.

This discussion speaks, to me, of the need for an “include these other
files” directive in the INI format.

The conventional syntax doesn't have such a thing. So different
extensions to the format have provided it in different (and probably
incompatible) ways.

As one example, Mercurial has a ‘%include’ directive
<URL:https://selenic.com/hg/help/config>.

Do we know of a convention that should be followed for including
multiple configuration files into a single stream of ConfigFile input?

-- 
 \                              “Holy rising hemlines, Batman!” —Robin |
  `\                                                                   |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney