Use an automatic code formatter and pre-commit hook?

[nicoddemus]

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking about some time now to use an automatic code formatter to our codebase such as black or yapf, together with pre-commit and tox environments to check for compliance on CI.

Pros:

• Consistent code formatting: currently the format is very mixed and we don't enforce it.
• Help new contributors: no need to think or follow a style guide, it is done automatically.

Cons:

• We will pollute the repository and lose some of the blame history.

Opinions?

[pytestbot]

GitMate.io thinks possibly related issues are #2390 (Use automatic CHANGELOG management), #2832 (exit code 2 when using '-x' flag), #2987 (Feature request: use caplog with custom formatter), #2421 (ModuleNotFoundError when using the tests outside application code layout), and #2124 (fixture hooks use session.ihook instead of a fitting hookproxy).

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

lets schedule this either right before or right after a major release
also lets take some extra care, since the tools are potentially problematic

i plan to test black on setuptools_scm again in future

[nicoddemus]

Agree with doing it after a minor release (I take that's what you meant right?) and to take care in using the tools (we need to see how they behave on a day to day basis). I also plan to do it in some plugins myself before committing to do the same in pytest.

I wrote this mostly to start gathering opinions.

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

whops, yes thats what i meant

[asottile]

I'm willing to help with this if you'd like :)

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

@asottile appreciated - basically i want to copy what i did for setuptools_scm/sentaku and you did for tox&others ^^

[asottile]

I think we're good to call this done 👍