1732922 - Investigate replacing `mozlint` with `coala`

Status: NEW

(Developer Infrastructure :: Lint and Formatting, task)

Description

[Andrew Halberstadt [:ahal]]

Coala is a lint framework that aims to solve many of the same goals as mozlint (provides a unified command line interface). I've been aware of this for awhile, but it didn't exist when I first wrote mozlint, and then we couldn't switch to it since it required Python 3.

Now that we're also on Python 3, we can look into switching. The work involved will not be trivial so the benefits will need to be worthwhile. In my opinion the benefits are (in decreasing order of importance):

• Editor integrations for most popular editors
• Large community support (3k stars, 400+ contributors)
• Support for most common linters out of the box
• Ability to write custom linters in other languages
• Better parallelization (probably)

There is an open question about how this tool will work (or not) in a repo the size of mozilla-central. mozlint was designed specifically for a monorepo of this size, so coala may struggle or not be able to replace it. Thus why investigation is required.

I'm filing this bug to get it down in writing somewhere, it is not a signal that we should prioritize this anytime soon.