White Space Cleanup Before Linting?

[kscottz]

I was taking a look at a PR last Friday and I finally got fed up with dealing with whitespace and newline errors from the linter. It feels like we spend way too much time dealing with whitespace errors, and those fixes block way too many pull requests. These errors can be really frustrating for new contributors and slow down smaller changes,.

I did a cursory search for a reStructured Text linter that attempts to fix the errors it finds. While that search didn't return any usable results I did find this generic whitespace cleanup Github action based on this tool.

Would the team be willing to try inserting this action prior to the linting action? I'm not convinced it would work but it is probably worth giving a try.

[fujitatomoya]

i think it is worth to give it a shot after some trials.

i am not sure https://github.com/marketplace/actions/fix-whitespace-action always works to make the linter happy, that is something we would want to make sure before activating this action. (i am concerned if there are any conflicts between this whitespace checker and linter)

and, according to

Setting fix: true fixes whitespace violations in place. Of course, these are fixed only in the checked-out version on the runner. You may be able to push these fixes pack to your repository, e.g., by opening a PR on your repository.

maybe github workflow provides, checking the whitespace violation with this tool, and provide suggested fixes how to address those whitespace violations. and then start the linter job to make sure everything is okay.