70 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
70 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
==============================================================================
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Datatracker development notes
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==============================================================================
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Introduction
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------------
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This file is ordered with the most recent dates at the top.
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23 Mar 2014
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...........
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Earlier, notes on choices made and paths taken, to the extent they have been
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written, has been sent by email and thus don't exist as a collection in one
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place.
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With my recent investigations of code analysis tools, I thought it might be
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a good idea to start collecting these in one place for the project.
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PyFlakes
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--------
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Pyflakes has proved robust and easy to work with, and has shown no false
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positives in the messages provided. It has been included in the form of a
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standalone management command, as well as a test suite test.
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Vulture
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-------
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Vulture has been a disappointment. Given that the purpose of using it was to
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discover dead code, it was necessary to extend the Vulture class to also parse
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and process variables in template files, as these are points where reference
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back to object methods and object attributes can be made.
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Unfortunately, once this extension was in place, it turned out that the amount
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of remaining false positives was unreasonably large, because Vulture fails to
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understand that the declarative style of Django models (from
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django.models.Model) and admin classes (from django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin)
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doesn't in fact constitute unused class attributes.
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Finally, it turns out that Vulture is really simpleminded about what
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constitutes usage. It has one set of global lists for used functions, used
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attributes, and used variables; any instance of overlapping function, method,
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variable, or attribute naming across modules will result in one instance of
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use in one module masking lack of usage in all other modules.
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At the moment, it looks like it might be a better way forward to see if
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PyFlakes could be extended with some dead code capability, than to continue to
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pound on what seems to be a broken framework in Vulture.
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PyLint
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------
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PyLint has been excluded from futher consideration because it doesn't only
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parse the code, it also executes it, which comes with both a speed penalty and
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the possibility of triggering unwanted side effects of doing an analysis run.
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PyChecker
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---------
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PyChecker turned out to require much more fiddling than PyFlakes in order to
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do the right thing, but once it was made to run on the datatracker code, and
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ignore the django code, it didn't report anything that PyFlakes hadn't already
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caught.
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