[ENH] Using some Python coding best practices for open source repositories

[fabianegli]

I propose that tis project adopts some of the standard Python development tools to make contributions easier and reduce some of the burden of new contributors.

• black and black-disable-checker for code formatting
• isort to systematically sorting the imports
• pylint to spot and fix mistakes, errors and code smells

Further tools that are not yet very useful here but might become handy in the future

• blacken-docs for documentation
• mypy if type annotations become a thing in this package.

[ypriverol]

Agreed. Do you know how we can enforce that by code or linting etc. Another question, do you know how to validate that with IDE as Pycharm?

[fabianegli]

I know how to enforce it in pull requests. I can add that to the repo.

RE PyCharm: I don't use it myself and can't immediately answer how to configure it, but I assume that it is possible.

One part is adding the necessary configuration files for the tools to the repo. For some this is only necessary if we stray awa from the default config.

isort likes to know what package is the "first-party" and I want it to force one line per import which makes the (git) diffs much more sensible.

I just saw in the CI of my last PR that this repo already uses pyre. Is there anyone here who has a preference for either? Using pyre instead of my initial proposal mypy is fine with me. And I think if you disable push to the master branch and only allow merging after successful checks, the type checking should be sufficiently enforced.

[fabianegli]

For the branch protection an admin needs to go to Setttings -> Branches and then click the "Add rule" in the "Branch protection rules" section, type the name of the branch to be protected (master) and then check at least the top two protections "Require a pull request before merging" and "Require status checks to pass before merging". That should do it.

[ypriverol]

I will protect the master.

[ypriverol]

For the branch protection an admin needs to go to Setttings -> Branches and then click the "Add rule" in the "Branch protection rules" section, type the name of the branch to be protected (master) and then check at least the top two protections "Require a pull request before merging" and "Require status checks to pass before merging". That should do it.

DONE.