fix LineLength

[sdarwin]

Hi,
I am linting a Jenkins Pipeline which uses Groovy. There are multiple LineLength warnings such as:

333   warning  The line exceeds 120 characters. The line is 341 characters.  LineLength

--fix doesn't adjust the line?

Meanwhile, I am not particularly knowledgeable in Groovy, and wonder what the proper fix is for each situation. Can I hit "Enter" and add newlines indiscriminately - probably not.

Having npm-groovy-lint be able to --fix this would be great! Meanwhile, is there a maybe a document that discusses solving LineLength? Not only for a "string", but also commands / functions. Searching the docs there are 0 results: "LineLength". Even if it's easy, include a paragraph, a sentence, describing the solutions.

[damien-rembert]

Hi, afaik this rule is provided by CodeNarc, you can find some context for that rule here:
https://codenarc.org/codenarc-rules-formatting.html#linelength-rule

If you've inherited that pipeline and the only concern is the length of some lines, I wouldn't worry too much about it especially if you're not too sure where to add line breaks. Long lines are not wrong or bad, they are just less convenient to read. You can disable this rule (or increase the maximum line length) using a config file, see https://github.com/nvuillam/npm-groovy-lint?tab=readme-ov-file#configuration

If you really want to keep all the rules and don't mind using Intellij, it has great Groovy support, and your IDE will happily format these lines for you. I think Eclipse also does a good job with Groovy but I have not really given it a go.

[sdarwin]

don't mind using Intellij, it has great Groovy support, and your IDE will happily format these lines for you

Interesting idea! Maybe that will be the best way.

[nvuillam]

@sdarwin > most linters do not autofix the "line too long", I would be afraid to break the code while doing that with Groovy ^^

[sdarwin]

The linter I'm most familiar with is Python Black. It does fix line length.

I would be afraid to break the code

Agreed. So the next best option is to compose documentation, even if as a fallback it merely refers to the official docs someplace else.
Well, it's just an idea. Currently a search of the linter docs here says "No matching documents" about the word "length".

[nvuillam]

@sdarwin npm-groovy-lint is a codenarc wrapper, the rules documentation is there, but we could scrap it to replicate some doc here :)

Would u be interested into working in such PR ?

[sdarwin]

Would u be interested into working in such PR ?

many times I do contribute to github projects, but in this case I am just an end-user hoping for some feature or answer. :-)

[nvuillam]

@sdarwin unfortunately i don't code in groovy for like 5 years so unfortunately i have many project that have priority over npm-groovy-lint ^^

But i'm always glad to keep the dependencies up to date and merge contributions... let's hope someone will see your request and take it :)

Maybe @damien-rembert ? 😊

[damien-rembert]

I'm not sure what could be done to make it easier to access the docs for CodeNarc to be honest. One of the first lines of the readme links to CodeNarc and there's multiple links to CodeNarc's rules in the "Configuration" section.
Maybe something really explicit like "npm-groovy-lint relies on CodeNarc for the definition of the rules" would help?
We could try to always provide the URL to the rule when an issue is found but I think that would be pretty brittle, we can't be sure their URLs are going to remain the same...
As to duplicating the docs from CodeNarc, what happened to "Don't Repeat Yourself" 😉

@sdarwin Have you tried setting the output to HTML? It's a little easier to access the definition of each rule as you can just follow the links. Otherwise I'll repeat myself and recommend trying IntelliJ (the free "Community" edition works fine for me) or Eclipse as an IDE and using npm-groovy-lint in CI (eg at work it's automatically triggered on pull requests and some of us have a git hook to run it on commit)

[damien-rembert]

Oh I was going to look into raising a quick PR if I could find somewhere to stick "npm-groovy-lint relies on CodeNarc for defining the rules" and I saw this flag which already offers what I was describing above: --returnrules: "Return rules descriptions and URL if set"

[sdarwin]

Maybe the responsibility can be bubbled up to
https://codenarc.org/
and from there to
https://groovy-lang.org/

where is the canonical reference to answer the question - Can I insert a newline or line break any place in a Groovy program? How do I break up a long line? (In functions, function calls, strings, arrays). Is that explained on https://groovy-lang.org/ ? which page? which section of the page (an anchor).

Whatever the answer is, mention it in codenarc.org -> LineLength.

Then npm-groovy-lint can refer questions to -> codenarc.org.