Pending cops

[agrimm]

For many of the style guide suggestions, I find that I agree with them, but past-self failed to abide by them. Is it possible for cops to act as if they're disabled, except that they report if the code is now clean?

[bbatsov]

I don't see how this can happen without RuboCop keeping track of its past invocations. I think that the autocorrect feature we're currently working on should solve your problems, since you'll be able to update big chunks of code fairly quickly that way.

Right now @edzhelyov is cooking a lot of improvements in the autocorrect department.

[agrimm]

I was envisaging it being like "pending" in RSpec: https://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec/wiki/Pending-Examples

"if it runs without a problem, it will be reported as a failure with a message indicating that you have a pending
example that no longer needs to be pending"

So for example if I have

RedundantReturn:
  Pending: true

then if I run Rubocop, and it finds a redundant return, then it won't report anything.

But if I run Rubocop, and it doesn't find a redundant return, it'd say something like

"RedundantReturn is marked as pending, but there are no redundant returns in the application. Set this cop to Enabled: true".

Is what I'm trying to say more clear now?

[jonas054]

What if RuboCop could generate configuration that disables all cops that have anything to report? That configuration file would server as a list of things to work through, and I think that solves your use case of having an overwhelming amount of reports in an old code base. I would prefer it for two reasons:

• We avoid having both Pending and Enabled parameters. I mean, Pending would probably have to override Enabled, or what would pending+enabled or pending+disabled mean?
• The configuration generation can be implemented as a formatter, fitting nicely into existing architecture.

It would lack the functionality you describe of reporting that some offence has now been removed, but I imagine that people would use the generated configuration as a todo list, removing the disabling one by one, or sometimes regenerating the list. It would tackle the overwhelming heap of reports effectively, I think.

[agrimm]

"Sometimes regenerating the list" would work for me.

[agrimm]

I tried out DisabledConfigFormatter, and it works well.