Lint Option

[discreet]

A tusk lint option would be useful for verifying complex Tusk files. I'm not sure how this might be implemented though since tusk lint could potentially be a task a user has written.

[rliebz]

Built-in linting would be really helpful. It would fit nicely as a global flag, like --lint, which would function the same way --help and --version do now. Both errors and warnings make sense, and I might also consider style messages to help with consistency for things like using hyphens instead of underscores in flag names, although I'm not sure how opinionated tusk should be there.

Here's a few examples of things that tusk can add linting for (I may edit this):

• Error: Invalid YAML
• Error: Incompatible types (e.g., boolean flag defaults to "foo")
• Error: Short flag name longer than one character
• Error: Duplicate short flag definition
• Error/Warning: Unknown YAML key name (currently a run-time error)
• Warning: Duplicate YAML map keys
• Warning: Deprecated constructs
• Warning: Unknown OS (based on GOOS values)
• Warning: No usage defined for task
• Warning: No usage defined for option

This is lower on my priority list, but I'd be happy to accept contributions here.

[discreet]

I think that is a good list and should cover just about all cases I can think of reasonably. I'm on the side that tusk should be as opinionated as it needs to be to consistent in regards to style. I do not think that those lint violations should result in errors though. I would like to see them as warnings.

I might be a little biased but I really like the way puppet-lint works.

[smyrman]

It would be possible, either as an initia proto-type or as a final approach to do this as a separate program tusk-lint. Would allow flags/config to the linter itself if that's relevant.