flake8-ownership 0.10.0

Checks for author, copyright, and license info.

flake8-ownership was inspired by flake8-copyright and a personal desire to learn how to write flake8 extensions. It’s meant to be a little more powerful than flake8-copyright while not quite as flexible as flake8-regex.

flake8-ownership can make sure your codebase has proper :author:, :copyright:, and :license: tags in each file. The required content of those tags is set in the flake8 configuration.

For example, the configuration for this project is:

[flake8]
author-re = ^Joe Joyce <[e-mail]>$
copyright-re = ^Copyright \(c\) Joe Joyce<COMMA> 2016-<YEAR>.$
license-re = ^BSD$

This configuration ensures that each file in the project has the following lines:

:author: Joe Joyce <[e-mail]>
:copyright: Copyright (c) Joe Joyce, 2016-2017.
:license: BSD

If any of those lines are missing, it’s a violation. If they don’t match the regex, it’s a violation. My apologies for the weird <COMMA> and <YEAR> stuff. Those special strings will be substituted with an actual comma and the current year, respectively. (For all three tags.)

Note that all three settings are optional; if you do not specify any of the -re settings, flake8-ownership will not do any checks. If you specify one or two, it will check only those one or two.

You may also specify multiple valid author/copyright/license regexes by supplying a comma separated list:

[flake8]
author-re =
  ^Joe Joyce <[e-mail]>$,
  ^John Everyman <[e-mail]>$

With that configuration, either of the following lines passes:

:author: Joe Joyce <[e-mail]>
:author: John Everyman <[e-mail]>

Contributing

There shouldn’t be much to contribute. This is a pretty small, simple project. If you run into bugs, please file them in the project’s issue tracker on Bitbucket. Code and documentation patches are welcome, but please shoot me a message before spending much time, so we can make sure the change is in line with the goals of the project.

For development you’ll need:

• Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6

• PyPy 2 and 3

• Standard build tools like gcc, make, etc

To get started, clone this repo, cd into its directory, and run make test. This will install the development tools and virtual environments, as well as run the linter and full test suite under all supported versions. If the tests pass, you’re all set up.

An Apology for the Configuration Syntax

It sucks, I know. The design requirements were:

1. Must support flexible specification of acceptable author/copyright/license lines. Since this is a programmer product, regexes are a good choice here.

2. Projects may include code from other projects. That code will have author/copyright/license lines that are different than the main project’s. So there must be a way to specify multiple acceptable values for each.

The last one tripped things up. Flake8 supports providing a list of values using a comma separated list:

[flake8]
some-setting =
  first thing,
  second thing,
  third thing

Great, but copyright lines often have commas in them:

[flake8]
copyright-re =
  Copyright 2016-2017, Joe Joyce,
  Copyright 2015 by Other Project and its contributers.

Whoops! The configuration parser reads this as three different regexes. Maybe we can escape the comma?

[flake8]
copyright-re =
 Copyright 2016-2017\, Joe Joyce,
 Copyright 2015 by Other project and its contributors.

No dice.

Ok, so we’ll have to have a placeholder and do some interpolation. Python format strings?

[flake8]
copyright-re =
 Copyright 2016-2017%(comma)s Joe Joyce,
 Copyright 2015 by Other Project and its contributers.

Bzzzt. The config parser tries to interpolate this value from the config file itself. And we don’t control the config parsing behavior so we can’t tell it not to do that.

And that’s why I ended up with the crappy, where-the-heck-did-that-come-from syntax that flake8-ownership uses:

[flake8]
copyright-re =
 Copyright 2016-2017<COMMA> Joe Joyce,
 Copyright 2015 by Other Project and its contributers.

The config parser doesn’t do anything clever with this, and flake8-ownership can replace <COMMA> with , when it processes the config values.

Changelog

0.10.0

• Formalized and documented Python 3 and PyPy support.

0.9.4

• Fixed copyright on this project.

0.9.3

• Added this changelog.

0.9.2

• Initial public release.

Pre-0.9.2

Initial releases and testing of the release tooling.