Allow a user to configure which hints are "fatal"

[sethladd]

Some customers treat some hints as fatal. Their build tools and continuous integration systems want to "fail" if certain hints pop up.

This is a request to allow us to use something like the .analysis_options file to declare, for a project, which hints are fatal.

This would be a big productivity win for us, and allow us to not have to force our users to run analyzer through our custom scripts.

Thanks!

[sethladd]

cc @devoncarew @Hixie

[Hixie]

Are there hints that nobody would ever want fatal?

[sethladd]

@Hixie definitely. some hints are contextual, and many hints are FYI (like, unused import)... not everyone wants to make that one fatal.

BTW I want to start a band called "Fatal Hints".

[Hixie]

You misunderstand my question. My question wasn't "are there hints that somebody doesn't want fatal". My question was "are there hints that nobody would ever want fatal". As in, are there hints like "by the way, nice code"? Or is it all things that are probably issues one way or the other, even if some people for some reason don't care about them?

[pq]

Following up on @Hixie's point (if I'm not misinterpreting), I'm curious if something like a single treatHintsAsErrors config might not be sufficient. Are there specific hints that should NOT fail a build? And more on that note, @sethladd I'm curious if there are still errors or warnings that you also want to special case? If so, maybe we should consider something like:

• treatHintsAsErrors to escalate hints, with
• general-purpose mechanism for ignoring/excluding specific errors

It occurs to me that there's at least conceptually some overlap with what the dev compiler does to escalate warnings... Paging @jmesserly to chime in on that! :)

[sethladd]

We need both:

• --fatal-hints (like we have --fatal-warnings)
• mechanism to fatalize specific hints/warnings

[jmesserly]

+1 Seth's comment

@Hixie wrote:

My question was "are there hints that nobody would ever want fatal".

fwiw, here's the hint list: pkg/analyzer/lib/src/generated/error.dart#L2830.

I think the answer is no. For each hint, someone would want it to be fatal.