Any interest in working out a standard API for calling linters?

[brettcannon]

@tjreedy

Since IDLE is all Python, my personal preference would be for a lint API (LAPI), similar to the DBAPI to get an iterable of tuples such as (filename, line, column, comment), to use in a ‘for’ statement.

That’s basically what I’m after as well (maybe a little more structured than a tuple, but same idea that you get an iterable back to loop over).

@tjreedy

The pycodestyle ‘filename:line:col: comment’ layout looks decent. But I don’t care about the particulars. To not break current users, a standard command-line option could be required by programs with a different form, and accepted by programs that already use that form.

If we can get an API then doing a wrapper to normalize output wouldn’t be difficult. And using entry point would allow for automatic tool discovery.

@tjreedy

I would like there to be a PEP defining the standard so I would be allowed to use it in IDLE.

My assumption is this would become a PEP to make sure linters in general were aware of it.

@isidentical

Maybe (filename: PathLike, position: Tuple[int, int, Optionalint], Optional[int]], message: str, extra_properties: Dict[str, Any]) .

My current thinking of an API is:

Class Diagnostic:
    path: os.PathLike[str]
	position: ((int, Optional[int]), (Optional[int], Optional[int]))  # To support col/row range.
	severity: SeverityEnum  # Or string with predefined values.
	message: str
	message_id: str
    tool: str

entry_point(root: Optional[os.PathLike[str]] = None, path: Optional[os.PathLike[str]] = None, source: Optional[str] = None) -> Iterable[Diagnostic]

@isidentical

+1! If anyone interested in starting to work, please let me know. I’d be happy to contribute to the efforts.

At this point I’m waiting to see who speaks up with interest and then going to PyCQA to see what the interest is over there.