Sphinx Lint

Sphinx Lint is based on rstlint.py from CPython.

What is Sphinx Lint, what is it not?

sphinx-lint should:

• be reasonably fast so it's comfortable to use as a linter in your editor.
• be usable on a single file.
• not give any false positives (probably a utopia, but let's try).
• not spend too much effort finding errors that sphinx-build already finds (or can easily find).
• focus on finding errors that are not visible to sphinx-build.

Known issues

Currently Sphinx Lint can't work with tables, there's no understanding of how linesplit works in tables, like:

   +-----------------------------------------+-----------------------------+---------------+
   | Method                                  | Checks that                 | New in        |
   +=========================================+=============================+===============+
   | :meth:`assertEqual(a, b)                | ``a == b``                  |               |
   | <TestCase.assertEqual>`                 |                             |               |
   +-----------------------------------------+-----------------------------+---------------+

as Sphinx Lint works line by line it will inevitably think the :meth: role is not closed properly.

To avoid false positives, some rules are skipped if we're in a table.

Releasing

One should use the populate-xpass.sh script before running tests before releasing, to avoid creating a release introducing false positives.

License

As this script was in the CPython repository the license is the Python Software Foundation Licence Version 2, see the LICENSE file for a full version.