[Python-Dev] pep8 reasoning

[Florent]

2014-04-26 0:46 GMT+02:00 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
> Florent is claiming the endorsement of the PEP 8 authors
> and the consensus of python-dev for the tool's default behaviour
> (as noted above, this makes it personal for me, as I am a
> co-author of PEP 8).

You're a co-author of PEP 8 since less than a year.
I'm the maintainer of the pep8 tool since 2010.

You should probably read the LICENSE file which is shipped with the
pep8 too, and the disclaimer that I've posted previously.  Never I
engage the responsibility of the authors of the PEP 8 document, and I
don't give any guarantee of being a *strict* PEP 8 compliance tool.

However, you should notice that your ticket in the tracker is opened
for 2 months only, and I did not flagged it as being resolved.  As
I've stated in my previous mail, I give priority to bugs over other
requests.  And even if you think it is a critical bug for yourself, it
did not appear like that for the thousands of people which used the
library for the last few years.

But if you read the documentation carefully, you can see that I've
already excluded some checks from the default behavior in the previous
releases, when there was an argument which was backed by the PEP 8
itself:
"In the default configuration, the checks E123, E133, E226, E241 and
E242 are ignored
because they are not rules unanimously accepted, and PEP 8 does not
enforce them."
http://pep8.readthedocs.org/en/latest/intro.html#error-codes
The question stay opened for issue #256 and codes E121 and E701.
As I said before, they are not against PEP 8, they interpret some words.
If you're nitpicking, you can probably reject half the checks of the
pep8 tool with similar allegations.

> I *want* to be able to recommend this tool universally. But at the moment,
> I cannot, as its name is a lie: it enforces rules I don't personally agree with.

Maybe I prefer you don't recommend it in the PEP 8 documentation if it
means I'll be tied to your "personal preferences" and that I'll be
forced to patch it every now and then when you change a line, or a
punctuation in a PEP 8 example.

At the end, I find you're a bit rude when you come to this project
which is not endorsed by the PSF or any Python-Dev related entity and
you say "this project is wrong, because the developer did not obey to
me when I order to remove that feature".
You're more sympathetic and less in a hurry when it comes to some
languishing bug on b.p.o :-)

If you're so impatient, let's fork it and put in in cpython/Tools/
I would not fight against it.

Sincerely,

-- 
Florent