FIXME tags in list of Problems?

[rdehouss]

Hello everyone,

Is it possible to have the FIXME items in the list of problems, like the TODO ones?
I thought it had to come from the dart linter and the dart analysis server but I asked in dart-lang/sdk#57200 and I was redirected to an "IDE" solution.
Although I'm able to highlight the FIXMEs, they don't appear in the list of problems...
Also, I think that these should not be "INFO" like the TODO but WARNING maybe?

Today, I add TODO before FIXME to have them in the list but it's not really convenient...

Thanks!

Raphaël

VSCode 1.44.1

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[DanTup]

The TODOs do come from the analysis server and there's no current way to customise them. From the link above it seems like IntelliJ does its own scanning for these, but in VS Code we just rely on them coming from the server.

@bwilkerson @pq is there any merit in having these customisable in the server (eg. a set of prefixes that you could customise the severity of) to avoid editors getting some from the server and using their own regex for others?

[pq]

It sounds like a reasonable idea to me but I can't speak to the cost. Looking at TodoFinder (where comments are scraped) it certainly seems doable. The more involved part is adding configuration support to the server protocol. @bwilkerson: thoughts?

[bwilkerson]

I don't know whether there's an industry standard for TODO-like comments, but if there is then we should probably support it without requiring customization. If there isn't, then some kind of customization is likely to be necessary (perhaps some metadata in the analysis options file). I do agree, though, that these should be coming from server and not from individual IDEs.

I am not opposed to having support for this. But I do have to raise the question of priority. Is this really the feature that will provide the greatest benefit to users for the developer and maintenance cost? I'm skeptical, but open to being proven wrong.

[DanTup]

I haven't used many IDEs, but I remember Visual Studio allowed them to be customised (though it didn't show them in the Problems list, but its own window). The defaults it has are HACK, NOTE, TODO, UNDONE, UnresolvedMergeConflict(!).

I'm not sure it's a priority (I don't think it's come up much before), though it is something I've wished for in the past (sometimes I need to make "urgent TODOs"... things that I can't fix now, but must be done before merging a PR, for ex. - it would be nice if I could mark them so that they showed up in the editor, but also failed a step on my CI/PR builds as a reminder).

I think we could leave this issue open here a while to collect 👍 's to see if there's enough demand to make it worthwhile.

[pq]

SGTM. Thanks @DanTup!

[csells]

I'd like to see us implement more than just TODO. Can we start w/ some common ones, e.g. TODO, HACK, NOTE, FIXME, UNDONE w/o going all the way into letting people define their own?

[bwilkerson]

Yes, we can do that. For TODO we support a couple of different styles:

• TODO
• TODO:
• TODO(username)

Do we need to support multiple styles for the other markers or just the marker followed by a colon (such as "FIXME:")?

[csells]

good catch. I think all three forms for the other common tags is ideal.

[DanTup]

Are these all reasonable to categorise under the existing TODO error type/error code? Does the user need some way to enable them individually?

I ask because NOTE seems a bit vague if there's no way to opt-out - I suspect I've written note: blah after many comments but wouldn't want them showing up in my Problems list even if I wanted TODOs.

[csells]

I think you're right, Danny. TODO, HACK, FIXME and UNDONE all fall into the category of "problem" and should be listed. We probably shouldn't add NOTE to this list so it doesn't show up under Problems. People can still use it, of course, but it'll be a, um, note and not a problem that needs fixing.

[bwilkerson]

I'll also note that we don't currently support anything except the uppercase form of 'TODO'. You can't write 'todo' or 'Todo' or any other combination if you want it to be picked up.

[csells]

the mixed and lower case versions seem like good alternatives for folks that don't want such notes to show up under Problems (in addition to the settings that Danny exposes allowing folks to turn that behavior on/off across an entire project).