[code-quality] Fwd: Flake8 News

[Ian Cordasco]

Alexandre and I accidentally had this discussion off list.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: afayolle <afayolle.ml at free.fr>
Date: Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:24 AM
Subject: Re: [code-quality] Flake8 News
To: Ian Cordasco <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com>


On mer. 10 juil. 2013 13:50:22 CEST, Ian Cordasco wrote:
> On Jul 10, 2013 6:33 AM, "afayolle" <afayolle.ml at free.fr
> <mailto:afayolle.ml at free.fr>> wrote:
> >
> > On 09/07/2013 08:36, Sylvain Thénault wrote:
> > > Hi Ian,
> > >
> > > On 04 juillet 11:42, Ian Cordasco wrote:
> > >> First, is there any interest in developing a pylint plugin for
> Flake8?
> > >> If so, who's interested in working with me on it. (I doubt we will
> > >> finish it today, but I'd at least like to start it.)
> > > On my side, I can't commit to find time to work on this but I
> would definitly
> > > like to have pylint integrated there and I'm willing to help
> anyone working on
> > > it. That would probably be a good opportunity to find common stuff
> done in pylint
> > > and flake8: I'm pretty sure both project may learn from each other
> on high-level
> > > stuff such as message control, ast handling, analysis execution...
> Pylint has been
> > > there for a while and has imo (truly objectivly, of course ;) neat
> features on
> > > that side.
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> >
> > Be aware of the licensing issue, though : depending on the way flake8
> > works (subprocess or import), the GPL license of Pylint could be an
> > issue if the flake8 authors want to stick to MIT.
> >
> > Alexandre
> > _______________________________________________
> > code-quality mailing list
> > code-quality at python.org <mailto:code-quality at python.org>
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/code-quality
>
> Thanks for that reminder and insight Alexandre! I don't remember if
> that's relevant to the general idea of how we will implement this. We
> would technically be blindly importing a plugin written by someone who
> would be providing us with our expected interface for using pylint.
> The same works for one-off plugins that do not interface with a third
> party tool. Would this still affect our licensing?
>

It all depends on the way the plugin works.

I'm not a lawyer, so take what I say with the usual caution. Here's my
understanding:

case 1: the plugin uses the command line API of Pylint to run Pylint in
a subprocess and parses Pylint's output to implement the Flake8 api. In
that case, the plugin can be under any license (e.g. MIT)

case2: the plugin imports bits of the pylint code, and uses Pylint's
API to do the checking and get the results. In that case the plugin
must be made available under the GPL. Since the MIT license is
compatible with the GPL, both the plugin and flake8 can be distributed.

Alexandre