Perl::Critic vs. Subversion

Hep,

Jeg har lige skrevet nedenstående mail til Perl::Critic users listen, men tænke at debatten måske også kunne være interessant i regi af Copenhagen Perl Mongers.

Mailen er på Engelsk, men jeg håber at I kan bære over med det.

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Hello,

I fell over the following tweet.

	http://twitter.com/perlcritic/status/15575614333

I understand Elliot's points and I do agree to some extent, but I think it is a bit one-sided. We have just had a presentation at a local Perl monger meeting where a local business presented there use of Perl::Critic integrated with their git solution - and this seemed to workout fairly well.

So I think some more debacle on the topic of using Perl::Critic with VCS pre-commit hooks is necessary, before eliminating this use as bad practice. So let me try to play the devils advocate here...

I think it is a tough balance to find out how much constraint you should put on the ability and ease of committing code to a repository.

But if you read the docs on Alexanders contribution, it actually opens up for ease of you in the case that Elliot is describing:

# Emergency commits: {0|1}. There are situations when you *do* need
# to commit changes bypassing all checks (e.g. emergency bug fixes).
# This featue allows you bypass Perl::Critic using “magic” prefix in
# comment message, e.g.: svn ci -m “NO CRITIC: I am in hurry” FooBar.pm
allow_emergency_commits => 1,

# Magic prefix described above can be customized:
emergency_comment_prefix => ‘NO CRITIC’,

And if I am not totally mistaken:

## no critic (RegularExpressions::ProhibitEscapedMetacharacters)

Should also do the job. 

Enough with the details. 

I think it is important to understand why static analysis is a good tool and what role it plays.

I often regard my ## no critic as TODO points, points to be revisited. And to me it is all about technical debt.

Perl::Critic helps us:

- writing maintainable code
- pin-pointing possible bugs or issues

So a quick fix circumventing the policies is introducing technical debt, breaking windows as it goes a long, so to speak.

So I need stronger arguments or war stories before discouraging the use of Perl::Critic based pre-commit hooks.

Anyone?

jonasbn