package-lint

This library provides a linter for the metadata in Emacs Lisp files which are intended to be packages. You can integrate it into your build process.

See flycheck-package, which uses this code to conveniently display packaging errors while writing elisp packages. This code was extracted from flycheck-package.el. We eventually want to use it for MELPA -- it will need to learn how to check multi-file packages, which was always going to be out of scope for flycheck-package.

Installation

The recommended way to get package-lint is as a package from the MELPA repository. The version of package-lint there will always be up-to-date. There are also packages in MELPA Stable, which track the latest numbered tag.

Usage

Use the command package-lint-current-buffer interactively, or use package-lint-buffer if linting programmatically.

If you're a package author, you can include package-lint in your build process by ensuring that the package is installed, and then using the function package-lint-batch-and-exit to lint your files -- see run-tests.sh in this repo for an example.

Roadmap

Additional checks for future versions:

• WARN: header line formatting / capitalisation
• trailing line presence / formatting
• WARN: library is called *-mode but doesn't provide a major mode
• WARN: suggest cl-lib vs cl
• non-use of standard keywords
• checkdoc failures for interactive functions / defcustoms
• trailing whitespace?
• themes which aren't in a matching *-theme.el file
• use of unsafe local variables
• use of emacs version dependencies
• local variable set in header line
• (with-)eval-after-load shouldn't generally appear in packages
• using commentary to talk about load[- ]path and installation
• lack of autoloads
• references to README files which won't be bundled in a package
• use of CamelCase identifiers
• Defining a -mode function directly instead of using define-derived-mode or define-minor-mode
• Referring to display-graphic-p or window-system in -theme.el files

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

See COPYING for details.

Credits

package-lint was written by Steve Purcell with significant contributions from Fanael Linithien.

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Author links:

Steve Purcell's blog // @sanityinc on Twitter