Use severity to determine default rule weight?

[bsara]

Currently (v1.20.0), as far as I've been able to tell, the only way that I can get detekt to report as passing (using the gradle plugin) is to manually set the weight to zero of each rule that I don't want to be seen as an error (i.e. so that warnings and infos don't cause failures).

I think that I would make sense to have the severity of a rule determine the default weight of the rule, no? e.g. all rules that don't have a severity of error would have a default weight of zero. If one wants they could always override the default weight with the already provided way of setting weights.

On top of that, it would be nice if the console reporters and the html/text reports showed the severity so that when an error is present, one can distinguish between errors, warnings, and info's in the reports.

Sorry if there is a way to do this already, I can't seem to find it if there is an existing solution.

[cortinico]

You're right that there is no "easy" way to do this today, beyond what you suggested.
We had a https://github.com/detekt/detekt/blob/main/detekt-api/src/main/kotlin/io/gitlab/arturbosch/detekt/api/SeverityLevel.kt which we don't really use effectively, and we don't let the user customize it that much.

I think that I would make sense to have the severity of a rule determine the default weight of the rule, no? e.g. all rules that don't have a severity of error would have a default weight of zero. If one wants they could always override the default weight with the already provided way of setting weights.

I think it will create more confusion at this stage, as we'll have to define arbitrary weight per severity which would force users to make calculations. Having everything weighted as 1 instead allows for further customization based on the codebase you're on.

[bsara]

Another option might be something like a failOnSeverities option where one could list the severities that would be seen as causing a task to be seen as failed.

As you can probably tell, my main point is that we should be able to have task seen as failed based on severity not just manually set weights.

[cortinico]

I'm just proposing that only rules with a severity of "error" cause a failure

I think we're missing a point here: there is no concept of "severity error" at the moment in Detekt. All the rules are treated equals. As I mentioned, there was a plan to implement SeverityLevel for every rule, but this is not implemented at the moment.

[bsara]

After reading through #3274, I see what you're saying.

Is there a plan to implement things according to these two comments in that issue?

• Configurable severity per rule #3274 (comment)
• Configurable severity per rule #3274 (comment)

It doesn't seem very clear to me what the long-term decision on the issue was there.

[cortinico]

I think we never came to a decision and this slowly got stale. I don't think we have a plan for this at the moment. Happy to re-evaluate if more users are requesting this specific issue

[bsara]

awesome! thanks

[schalkms]

I agree with @cortinico.

I think it will create more confusion at this stage, as we'll have to define arbitrary weight per severity which would force users to make calculations. Having everything weighted as 1 instead allows for further customization based on the codebase you're on.

However, you could adjust the weight in the detekt.yml configuration via script based on the defined SeverityLevel in the source code of the corresponding rule.

Note that, we also had a discussion in #3274 for that topic. There was not much feedback from the community about changing this option, though.

[bsara]

See my responses to to @cortinico.