Provide a command to check validity of ABOUT files

[tdruez]

Given a directory, I'd like to run a simple command to ensure the validity of all my ABOUT files.
Something like:

aboutcode check codebase/

This would return the list of errors and warnings along a proper exit code, or 0 if all ABOUT files are valid.

The purpose is to run that command before committing new libraries to a codebase and during the continuous integration, to prevent from pushing malformed ABOUT files and catch the potential issues upfront.

[tina1998612]

Is this like checking the version and the validity of the urls in the ABOUT file?

[pombredanne]

@tina1998612 this would more to actually load all ABOUT from a directory like this is done alright and then parse and report errors with a proper return code.
e.g. the validation would be done by lib alright.

What is done today is mostly it except the output is CSV. Here what @tdruez needs is not a CSV but a pass/fail command with proper error/warning details sent to stdout such that you can then integrate that as part of a test/CI run

[tina1998612]

@pombredanne can I take a look at the CSV output generated?

[pombredanne]

@tina1998612 you could but that would likely be hackish. Instead you likely could do the exact same by iterating collected About objects, and gathering the errors and warning then print these to stderr if any and return a failure error code in that cli run.

[tina1998612]

@pombredanne so I may take reference at the data here for testing?

[chinyeungli]

@tina1998612 Yes.

[pombredanne]

@tina1998612 Any update on your side?

[chinyeungli]

The basic feature is there, but maybe hard to read since there is no reference about which errors reference to which about files. See #284

[tdruez]

@chinyeungli Great start! Easy to use:

./about check thirdparty/
Running attributecode version 3.0.0.dev4
Checking ABOUT files...
CRITICAL: Cannot load invalid ABOUT file: '/Volumes/nexB/dejacode/thirdparty/FixedHeader.ABOUT': ParserError()
CRITICAL: Cannot load invalid ABOUT file: '/Volumes/nexB/dejacode/thirdparty/Font-Awesome.ABOUT': ScannerError()

Now, ParserError() and ScannerError() does not help a lot to figure out the issue. Could you provide the line number?

Also, could you return the exit code 1 in case of errors? This will allow to make the continuous integration fail using this value for example.
See https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/blob/master/pycodestyle.py#L2353 for example.
You can refer to https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle for a good example of a tool that's easy to integrate to a continuous integration and returns nice errors output: https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle#example-usage-and-output