I'd like to propose cleaning up Django's codebase so that we can run flake8 (with some rules ignored) as a presubmit check (for example, hooked into pull request submissions).
Our docs currently state: "Note, however, that patches which only remove whitespace (or only make changes for nominal PEP 8 conformance) are likely to be rejected, since they only introduce noise rather than code improvement. Tidy up when you’re next changing code in the area." I somewhat disagree, I think it's better to make cleanups in separate commits so that when looking at a commit, you don't need to figure out what changes are stylistic and what changes are needed for the fix. The benefit of doing the cleanup now is that we could automate these style checks afterward which will make code review more efficient. As Alex wrote in his blog post on code review<http://alexgaynor.net/2013/sep/26/effective-code-review/>: "Don't use humans to check for things a machine can. This means that code review isn't a process of running your tests, or looking for style guide violations." A drawback is that it will introduce some noise in the commit history in the short term and make git blame less efficient. I believe the long term benefit of not being at war with these issues is worth this trade-off. If accepted, I'll put together a more concrete proposal that includes which errors we'll ignore, etc. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/6c55f4a2-3875-4fd1-9c3e-891fa789d0e2%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
