[Python-Dev] Direction of PyChecker

[Jeremy Hylton]

>>>>> "NN" == Neal Norwitz <neal@metaslash.com> writes:

  NN> Jeremy Hylton wrote:
  >> It would be much more helpful if the default setting identified
  >> real bugs rather than coding style issues.  The doc string one is
  >> probably the most glaring.  Add a -Wall option that turns on
  >> everything to satisfy the pedants.

  NN> This is generally true for more advanced users, but not
  NN> necessarily for newbies.  There is the -e/--errors which
  NN> eliminates many warnings.

Do you mean that it is better for newbies if the tool emits many
warnings though they may be spurious?  I would think the reverse: A
newbie is going to have a lot more trouble deciding that the bug
reported by PyChecker is, in fact, not a bug at all.  They haven't
developed the expertise or confidence to disagree with the tool.

In part, it's a question of first impressions.  If the user sees a
very high number of false positives the first time they see the tool,
they're not going to see it as very useful.

  >> By way of example, I used pychecker on urllib2 yesterday.  It
  >> reported 78 bugs of which 3 were real.  Based on that feedback, I
  >> wouldn't use the tool again, but would let other people sift
  >> through the noise and report the bugs back to me.

  NN> I ran checker w/--errors on urllib2.  There were some warnings
  NN> which should have been excluded--I'll have to fix those.  But of
  NN> the 12 warnings produced there seems to be one real bug, which
  NN> you may have caught:

I don't know what I'm doing differently today, but I don't see any of
the warnings about classes without doc strings and the like.  Could
something have changed very recently?  Was I imagining the output I
saw the other day?

  NN> 	urllib2.py:1054: No global (OpenerDirectory) found

Yes.  This was one of the typos it found.

  NN> It's not always easy to know if there should really be a warning
  NN> or not.  For example, an unused variable could be a real bug,
  NN> even though often it is not.  No class attribute warnings are
  NN> likely bugs, but could depend a lot on how one codes.

There seem to be a lot of spurious complaints related to class
hierarchies.  I see a bunch of complaints that a sublcass doesn't have
an __init__() -- but subclasses don't need to have an __init__ and
often shouldn't.  There are also complaints about attribute used by an
abstract base class but only defined in the subclass.

Jeremy