[all][tc] Lets talk about Flake8 E501

Ghanshyam Mann gmann at ghanshyammann.com
Sat May 28 16:04:04 UTC 2022


 ---- On Fri, 27 May 2022 21:24:32 -0500 Miro Tomaska <mtomaska at redhat.com> wrote ----
 > Hello All,
 > This is probably going to be a hot topic but I was wondering if the community ever considered raising the default 79 characters line limit. I have seen some places where even a very innocent line of code needs to be split into two lines. I have also seen some code where I feel like variable names were abbreviated on purpose to squeeze everything into one line.
 > How does the community feel about raising the E501 limit to 119 characters? The 119 character limit is the second most popular limit besides the default one. It's long enough to give a developer enough room for descriptive variables without being forced to break lines too much. And it is short enough for a diff between two files to look OK.
 > The only downside I can see right now is that it's not easy to convert an existing code. So we will end up with files where the new code is 79+ characters and the "old" code is <=79. I can also see an argument where someone might have trouble reviewing a patch on a laptop screen (assuming standard 14" screen) ?

This is a good point and having such in-consistency will be more problems than having it more than
79 char for the reason you mentioned above. And I do not think we will be able to convert all the
existing code to the new limit.

I feel more comfortable with 79 char when I review on a small or large screen. If we end up scrolling horizontally
then it is definitely not good. Log files are good examples of it.

For long line/var name, we do split line due to the 79 char limit but I do not think that is more cases in our code,
 maybe ~1% of our existing code?

I think keeping consistency in code is important which is what flake8/pep8 checks are all about.

-gmann
 
 > 
 > Here is an example of one extreme, a diff of two files maxing out at 119 characters
 > https://review.opendev.org/c/opendev/sandbox/+/843697/1..2
 >  Thank you for your time and I am looking forward to this conversation :) 
 > --
 > Miro Tomaskairc: mtomaskaRed Hat



More information about the openstack-discuss mailing list