1.9 KiB
Why there are no built-in rules in elm-lint
elm-lint comes with no rules out of the box. It used to have some, but then I
decided it was better to have them all extracted into different packages.
The main reason, is that if elm-lint had "core" rules, users would think they
are all best practices. I am of the opinion that in practice, any rule that
could be written can potentially be unwanted under certain circumstances, and
can therefore hardly be enforced all the time without more consideration.
elm-lint is plenty opinionated, but what counts as best practices in terms of
which linting configuration is not its concern, it's up to each user to decide
carefully whether or not to enable it. elm-lint will just provide the tools to
do so.
Maybe some semi-official linting packages will emerge
If there are no core rules, then there are also no technical distinctions between then and package rules. They all have access to the same tools, and there is no rule that can do more than an other could.
A benefit of this, is that elm-lint will not need to have major version
changes when one of its rules gets updated or removed, because it doesn't have
one.
The inconvenience, is that if elm-lint happens to have a major version, which
I try to prevent as much as possible, all packages that depend on it (meaning at
least all packages with linting rules) will need to be updated and re-released,
similar to what would happen when Elm gets a new (major or minor) version. Since
Elm doesn't (in practice) allow for duplicate dependencies with different major
versions, users would not be able to use the next version of elm-lint with the
updated version of each package, until all packages are updated. Or they will
need to disable the rules from non-updated packages for a while.
This would happen even if there are built-in rules too, but more work would need
to be done by the community to bump their packages.