Adding linting for consistent coding standards

[adityakiran1423]

Hello everyone, this discussion is regarding linting, more specifically adding linting to the CI process.
There are a lot of projects going on in C++/C# which has led to contributors involved in both projects using the same conventions in the python codebase.
For example, check issue #286, adding linting will ensure this issue won't occur again.

If we go ahead with adding linting support into the CI process, there are two main options to choose from :

1. pylint
2. flake8

Both of them have their cons and pros, this table provides a good reference (link to adrticle):

Any ideas, questions, suggestions or queries regarding this can be sorted and decided whether linting can be added or not.

Thank you!!

[K20shores]

@boulderdaze @montythind @mattldawson @mwaxmonsky do any of you have thoughts on this?

[K20shores]

Got it. I like the sound of ruff simply because it mixes the linting and formatting. @adityakiran1423 would you be interested in rewriting our pep8 action so that it uses ruff? If so, I'll make an issue with a few suggestions

[adityakiran1423]

Hello, apologies for the delayed message. I wouldn't mind taking up rewriting the pep8 action @K20shores !! I'll have to go through their docs first. As to what @mwaxmonsky mentioned about conflicting rules, I think ruff has a config file in which we can specify the the style guide we want to implement. We can make ruff use the black formatter from what I have heard. Just wondering, for what other action do we need to use anything apart from ruff @mwaxmonsky ?
Here's the page which explains configuring ruff

[K20shores]

We don't have any particular rules that we're looking to enforce from the ACOM side. @mwaxmonsky, is there anything from CAM-SIMA (which is sensible) that we should enforce in our python code?

[mwaxmonsky]

Apologies for the delay! We currently have a .pylintrc in CAM-SIMA (https://github.com/ESCOMP/CAM-SIMA/blob/development/test/.pylintrc) but as this is only the pylint options (ruff will have many more options from the different analyzers), I'm amenable to any configuration options that are reasonable.

[mwaxmonsky]

I also spent some time digging into our other core projects and we had a linter configured in https://github.com/NCAR/ccpp-framework but I had to remove it because it was causing conflicts (particularly between python 3.8 and 3.9+). It's been on my todo list to add it back to that as well.