[code-quality] flake8 organization configuration

[Liam Stewart]

We have multiple python projects over multiple (private) repos in github
and I would like all of them to share a standard, organization-wide style
(eg. line length, any explicit select/ignore settings, etc.). Each
individual project could have a configuration that contained
project-specific settings. This would normally be additional ignore
settings (eg. to gradually transition a project to our style rule by rule).
Ideally, a developer should be able to run a single command to do style
checks.

I'm looking for guidance about how to go about doing this with flake8. What
I was thinking was that we'd have a private python package that brings in
flake8 plus any plugin packages and custom extensions (similar to hacking);
it would also bring in the global configuration file. In this way, projects
could simply add, say, <org>-flake8 to their requirements.txt file. I'm
pretty sure that we'd need a wrapper script to handle the global
configuration. The question is more about how to specify the global config
correctly.

flake8's doesn't seem to have the notion of a global base configuration;
the closest thing is the user configuration, but that is layered on top of
whatever project configuration there is. The "--config" argument isn't
useful as that forces a single configuration file. "--append-config" is a
possibility. A wrapper that runs flake8 with --append-config to layer first
global + local could work but local settings would have to be in a fixed
file. We'd layer local-global-local. That's sort of ok, but would lead to
surprising results if a dev put settings in say "setup.cfg" and the wrapper
always tried ".flake8" (though we could minimize such surprises by
specifying all known project file names..).

Is there another way to go about this that I haven't considered? Would it
be reasonable to add a "--prepend-config" argument? In which case the
layering order would be prepend, local files, append, user. (Happy to
submit a PR or whatever the gitlab equivalent is.)

Thanks,

liam

-- 
Liam Stewart :: liam.stewart at gmail.com
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