Idea: Store config in guides

[jferris]

We're in a situation now where adding a new style guideline means:

1. Opening a pull request to guides.
2. Waiting a week for discussion.
3. Merging the pull request.
4. Opening a pull request to hound.
5. Reviewing, merging, and deploying that pull request.

In between steps 3 and 5, we get comments from Hound which conflict with our style guide.

It would be nice if:

• We had a config file in the guides repo.
• We could point Hound to it as our default config.
• Hound would somehow fetch updates for that config.

This way, we could update the config as part of pull requests which change the style guidelines. The guides and Hound will never be out of sync.

[jferris]

@salbertson @gylaz any thoughts on this? If you think it's a good idea, I may take a crack at it this week.

[gylaz]

@jferris It is best not to change Hound default config because it unexpectedly affected our unsuspecting users. We felt this pain when we made the change to Hound's default config when switching to double quotes everywhere. It might be best to generate a default .hound.yml in suspenders for each project, or some other strategy.

[jferris]

@gylaz I think it makes sense not to change everybody's config, but for thoughtbot itself I'd rather have organization-wide configuration than per-project configuration in general. Part of the appeal of Hound over Rubocop is that it removes the need for updating per-project configs when we change our style guide.

[gylaz]

Then perhaps we can build something into Hound itself to detect if a project is a thoughbot project and then use the config file that lives on guides.

[jferris]

My instinct was to build it in a generic way based on GitHub organizations, but either way would work for me.

[salbertson]

@jferris, organization level configuration is something we are talking about adding. There has been talk of creating a UI in Hound to manage these style guides.

I think it would be pretty cool if Hound could use a gist or a file in a repo for each language.