Enable JavaScript linting with Hound

[c-lliope]

Hello, jQuery team!

thoughtbot recently released Javascript linting for Hound, and I think it would be a good tool for this project. I saw that jQuery has a JS style guide for its projects – if you have to point out a lot of style violations in pull requests, I think it would be worth giving Hound a spin for a while. It's free for open source, and it's helped me out a lot in my projects.

If you haven't heard of Hound, it's a github integration that watches repos for pull requests and points out style guide violations in the PRs. There's some background on it here: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/hound-reviews-javascript-for-style-violations

This PR configures Hound to watch for violations based on your jsHint settings. To get Hound to watch this repo, an admin would also have to activate the repo at https://houndci.com/.

So you can get an idea of what Hound would look like, I've opened a pull request on my fork of jQuery with some style violations. You can check it out here: https://github.com/graysonwright/jquery/pull/1

For full disclosure, I work at thoughtbot, which makes Hound. We're trying to spread the word a bit by suggesting Hound to open-source projects where it would be a good fit. But you don't have to worry – we're big supporters of open source, and Hound will stay free for open source projects forever.

Either way, thanks so much for jQuery – it's a great library and we use it every day. I hope Hound can make your jobs a little bit easier!

Cheers,
-Grayson

[dmethvin]

We currently run our build process against every pull request, which includes both JSHint and JSCS checks. What does Hound add to what we already have?

[c-lliope]

@dmethvin Nice!

Hound for JavaScript is running JSHint under the covers.

It will comment on the pull request in-line with each style guide violation (up to 10 per commit), which some people say makes it easy to see when they've written a style violation. Others find the comments noisy.

It will set a separate pull request status check:

For some teams, they prefer to have style be separate and not fail the build. It looks like jQuery prefers the other way, to make style part of a single build, and fail if not linting.

It sounds like in this case, it may not be a good fit, but either way, there's more linted JavaScript code in the world, which is great.

[arthurvr]

I like our current setup. Automated comments for this kinds of things are a little too noisy I think. For us, mostly a comment like "could you please make sure all code matches our style guide?" works well enough IMHO.