Consider migrating categories to tags

[pq]

In the current incarnation, lints can belong to a single category but moving forward it would be interesting to consider a tag approach. A few ideas for tags that come to mind:

• FLUTTER
• PACKAGE: MOCKITO
• DEPRECATED
• EXPENSIVE

But I'm just spit-balling!

/cc @srawlins

[srawlins]

I like those. I also like, STYLE, PERFORMANCE, ERROR-PRONE, CODE BLOAT

[pq]

👍

@srawlins qq:

ERROR-PRONE -- do you mean the lint is prone to error? (e.g., false positives?)

[srawlins]

No, I mean like "Code that violates this lint is error-prone", like control_flow_in_finally, and no_adjacent_strings_in_list and unrelated_type_equality_checks.

[srawlins]

I see now that the "categories" are actually Groups defined in the analyzer, with a few built-in values. It's ok having non-built-in values. But I'll have to update LintRule in the SDK to specify groups now instead of group.

LintGroup also uses groups for its compareTo:

sdk/pkg/analyzer/lib/src/lint/linter.dart

Lines 255 to 261 in 77202bf

	int compareTo(LintRule other) {
	var g = group.compareTo(other.group);
	if (g != 0) {
	return g;
	}
	return name.compareTo(other.name);
	}

Strange. Having multiple groups per rule will break this notion.

[pq]

Yeah. This wasn't entirely by design. The group stuff got pulled into analyzer in a bulk move to ease maintenance. It's probably not the best place for it to be if we're going to be changing it. As for compareTo, we can re-think it. There are probably better ways to establish natural order.

[pq]

@jcollins-g just gave (well, is giving 😛) a demo of category support for dartdoc (dart-lang/dartdoc#1681) which is making me think we should seriously consider using it rather than creating our own new thing.

[srawlins]

Hi @pq the category/tag concept doesn't seem very complex. Right now the Group class in analyzer is super small. What complexity would we avoid duplicating? In particular the Category and Categorization classes (from dartdoc's model.dart) I think have a lot of complexity that would make this harder to integrate than to just adjust the Group class.

[pq]

Thanks for cycling back to this @srawlins! I'm going to pack-peddle (bad pun, ha) and say we should just do our own thing. Onward!

⚡️ 🚲 ⚡️

[srawlins]

Excellent! Not high priority, but I'll change gears (🚲) after a few other items and look into this.