Require that ignores are effective

[ericcornelissen]

Suggestion to check that all ignores specified in the configuration are used to ignore something and report any that are not.¹ If an ignore is ineffective it should probably cause dirty-waters to fail hard (i.e. non-zero exit code) and it may need to be an opt-in feature (or else have an opt-out available).

The reason I believe this is useful is that once something you ignored has been resolved you probably do not want to just accept that smell again in the future. If you do not know that an ignore is no longer effective you won't realize the smell has been resolved (which is probably nice to know about in any case), and you might inadvertently introduce it again at a later point in time.

Footnotes

1. This is similar to the --report-unused option I created for a related project. ↩

[randomicecube]

The reason I believe this is useful is that once something you ignored has been resolved you probably do not want to just accept that smell again in the future.

How would this be enforced though? I guess if smells were allowed to be set as a specific severity by the users this could be a thing, and then they'd set these smells as critical, automatically breaking CI if they're found again, but in its current state I'm not quite sure.

[ericcornelissen]

How would this be enforced though?

The way I would do this is conceptually quite simple: as I iterate through the smells I'd take a note of every ignore rule I used (e.g. by its ID, if any, or by tainting the rule or similar) and after having gone through all smells I check if there are any ignore rules that I have not noted, if there are any then that can be reported.

I guess if smells were allowed to be set as a specific severity by the users this could be a thing, and then they'd set these smells as critical, automatically breaking CI if they're found again, but in its current state I'm not quite sure.

I'm not quite sure I follow. My goal is just to avoid ignoring things that were at one point resolved. Whether I care enough about it to, e.g., break CI is an orthogonal question. If I don't, but I do want to see such cases in the report (without breakage) then I'd want to know about it just as much as other new smells.