Adopt pylint and lint the existing modules

[safa-topal]

What is currently missing?

A set of standards around code style would help code readability and consistency among different modules of the project. Pylint seems like the way to go option.

Is this a feature you would work on yourself?

• I plan to open a pull request for this feature

[laysauchoa]

do you plan to work on that @safa-topal? also, do you recommend adding that to the workflow check like github actions, for example?

[inifares23lab]

is anybody working on this?
can I try to tackle it?

1. is pylint the chosen option?

• with default options?

2. do we want to add a linting workflow?

• would it be best to fail the workflow and tell the developer to lint, fix, commit and push again
• or can we automate this(would be nice but there may be some security issues with granting content write access); i.e.:
  a. set linting as first and required by other workflows
  b. lint
  • if there are no required changes: continue with other workflows
  • if changes are required: fix, commit, push and stop following workflows

[inifares23lab]

Actually I changed idea.
Too much added complexity for not enough value for the automated option.
Still keen to hear other opinions though

[ftisiot]

I'll probably leave @TibsAtWork to comment!

[TibsAtWork]

I'm a bit out-of-date with the current best practices, so a useful task, in itself, would be to do the research and report back on what is considered the best thing to do at the moment.

Historically, I believe people have either used pylint (which tends to require configuration) or other more simpler opinionated (less configurable) tools like flake8 (there certainly used to be more than one choice for this sort of tool, but flake8 was one I used). These can be run as another part of the GitHub workflow - see the https://github.com/Aiven-Open/metadata-parser/tree/main/.github/workflows directory for existing workflows.

There's also the possibility of running black at some stage, to reformat the code in a consistent way - I've seen this done using a pre-commit hook (see https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/integrations/source_version_control.html). One might then run black in the CI toolchain to check that there are no changes - this makes sure contributors are remembering to run it!. It would obviously be up to @ftisiot whether he's happy to have black run on the codebase

Since we don't have particular ideas on what should be done, any contribution is likely to make things better!