multiline-comment-style rule is off

[bryankennedy]

I was reading rule 18.1 and noticed that I've never seen my airbnb configured linter say anything about this. I looked in the rules and noticed that the starred-block option is spelled out but it set to off.

Is there a reason why this is set to off vs error?

[ljharb]

It’s not a rule we enforce; however, the configuration is set up how we would enforce it so you can easily enable it.

[bryankennedy]

Ah that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Is there a way to differentiate rules in the documentation that are enforced, or on, versus the ones that simply have the way it would be enforced if it were on?

[ljharb]

We don’t currently have a way to distinguish that, no.

[Zamiell]

It’s not a rule we enforce; however, the configuration is set up how we would enforce it so you can easily enable it.

@ljharb Sorry for the ping, but can you go into more detail on this sentence? Why would some of the Airbnb rules be enforced and others not? Forgive me, but I would naively expect that the Airbnb style guide (or any other style guide, for that matter) would have a corresponding eslint rule enabled for every particular thing that it prescribes.

If I am interpreting this correctly, it sounds like the Airbnb style guide is segmented into two different sections, with one being "super important rules that must be enforced" and the other being "rules that we have an opinion on but are not important enough to enforce". Is that correct? If so, doesn't that lead to a lot of confusion? Especially when the style guide itself (README.md) does not seem to make any mention of this mysterious segmentation. (I searched for the word "enforce" and didn't seem to find anything.) At the very least, shouldn't this mysterious segmentation be fully documented for the end-user?

[ljharb]

@Zamiell that is a reasonable expectation, but not an accurate one. Some guidelines, as rules, would be too noisy on a legacy codebase, for example.

Everything in the readme is a strict rule that's important to follow. Which subset of it is enforced by the linter doesn't affect the importance of individual guidelines.