716748 - Investigate Google's Android Lint tool for scanning project resources for potential bugs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1170283

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P4)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Android Lint is an SDK tool which scans Android project sources for potential bugs. It is available both as a command line tool, as well as integrated with Eclipse. Here are some examples of the types of errors that it looks for:

* Missing translations (and unused translations)
* Layout performance problems (all the issues the old layoutopt tool used to find, and more)
* Unused resources
* Inconsistent array sizes (when arrays are defined in multiple configurations)
* Accessibility and internationalization problems (hardcoded strings, missing contentDescription, etc)
* Icon problems (like missing densities, duplicate icons, wrong sizes, etc)
* Usability problems (like not specifying an input type on a text field)
* Manifest errors

Fennec does not have a typical Android project structure, but I think we can lint the generated files in OBJDIR/dist/fennec or OBJDIR/mobile/android.

http://tools.android.com/tips/lint

Comment 1

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Attachment: Lint log

Running lint on inbound, I get 226 errors and 627 warnings. See attached log.

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Can you filter the "Call requires API level X (current min is Y)" errors? Calling APIs above our minimum API level is a feature, not a bug. :)

Comment 3

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Attachment: Lint log with --disable NewApi

(In reply to Chris Peterson (:cpeterson) from comment #2)
> Can you filter the "Call requires API level X (current min is Y)" errors?
> Calling APIs above our minimum API level is a feature, not a bug. :)

Yeah, though I think the proper way to get rid of these is to annotate code with @TargetApi: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/annotation/TargetApi.html.

Calling lint with --disable NewApi hides most of the errors; log attached.

Comment 4

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Noting that any implementation here will likely get wrapped with the work in bug 939350, which is a python lint API that will potentially be integrated with mach and/or hg.

Comment 5

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Note that this is easy to do ad hoc in Eclipse.