In a community project, opened to various contributors, there are a few thing to take care of in order not to break the code. I am not talking about code reviewing but about bad code editing that breaks it all.

Most frequent errors are:

<tab> insertions , that get mixed with space-based indentation

, that get mixed with space-based indentation carriage return insertion, before line feeds with some weird windows editors

Instead of tracking the developers that commited such things, and send them an army of white rabbits, an automatic code check is way better. It is not a good idea though, to clean up incoming code. The best thing to do is to block unwanted changes and warn the commiters, so they learn about it.

This is really easy with Subversion. I have grabbed a script on the web, and adapted it a bit for this task. Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/python2.4 # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # adapted from: # http://blog.wordaligned.org/articles/2006/08/09/a-subversion-pre-commit-hook # by Tarek Ziadé from subprocess import Popen from subprocess import PIPE import re import os re_options = re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL class EOF(object): def findall(self, content): if content.endswith('\

'): return [] return ['

'] tab_catcher = re.compile(r'^\\t', re_options) windows_catcher = re.compile(r'\\r\

$', re_options) testers = (('found TAB', tab_catcher), ('found CR/LF', windows_catcher), ('no new line at the end', EOF())) def command_output(cmd): """ Capture a command's standard output.""" return Popen(cmd.split(), stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0] def files_changed(look_cmd): """ List the files added or updated by this transaction.""" def filename(line): return line[4:] def added_or_updated(line): return line and line[0] in ("A", "U") return [filename(line) for line in command_output(look_cmd % "changed").split("n") if added_or_updated(line)] def file_contents(filename, look_cmd): """Return a file's contents for this transaction""" return command_output("%s %s" % (look_cmd % "cat", filename)) def test_expression(expr, filename, look_cmd): """test regexpr over file""" return len(expr.findall(file_contents(filename, look_cmd))) > 0 def check_file(look_cmd): """checks Python files in this transaction""" def is_python_file(fname): return os.path.splitext(fname)[1] in ".py".split() erroneous_files = [] for file in files_changed(look_cmd): if not is_python_file(file): continue for error_type, tester in testers: if test_expression(tester, file, look_cmd): erroneous_files.append((error_type, file)) num_failures = len(erroneous_files) if num_failures > 0: sys.stderr.write("[ERROR] please check your files:n") for error_type, file in erroneous_files: sys.stderr.write("[ERROR] %s in %sn" % (error_type, file)) return num_failures def main(): from optparse import OptionParser parser = OptionParser() parser.add_option("-r", "--revision", help="Test mode. TXN actually refers to a revision.", action="store_true", default=False) errors = 0 (opts, (repos, txn_or_rvn)) = parser.parse_args() look_opt = ("--transaction", "--revision")[opts.revision] look_cmd = "svnlook %s %s %s %s" % ( "%s", repos, look_opt, txn_or_rvn) errors += check_file(look_cmd) return errors if __name__ == "__main__": import sys sys.exit(main())

I’ve also added a new line at end of file control. This script has to be called in the pre-commit hook script (look up in SVN documentation)

The call should look like:

/chemin/vers/script/svn_check_source.py "$REPOS" "$TXN" || exit 1

You can then extend the controls made by this script, by controlling for example the quality of the commited code with tools like pychecker. But these extra controls should not block commits and should be quite light to perform because the commiter waits for the changeset to be validated.

Sending a mail to the commiter with suggestions when her code doesn’t pass some quality checks is a better idea. Furthermore, for an extensive QA test, it is simpler to hook a script on a system like buildbot and create a nighlty digest over the whole code base. Pylint is very handy on this kind of controls, and can be fine tuned to generate a useful QA report that buildbot can send to developers.