everything e-diotic

Alexander Simakov has created a general script for use as a pre-commit hook in Subversion integration Perl::Critic, he describes it in his blog.

Elliot have previously discouraged this in his blog, so this of course got mentioned on twitter.

Going over the documentation of: perlcritic-checker.pl in relation to Elliot’s point of view, the following stood out.

# Emergency commits: {0|1}. There are situations when you *do* need
# to commit changes bypassing all checks (e.g. emergency bug fixes).
# This featue allows you bypass Perl::Critic using “magic” prefix in
# comment message, e.g.: svn ci -m “NO CRITIC: I am in hurry” FooBar.pm
allow_emergency_commits => 1,

# Magic prefix described above can be customized:
emergency_comment_prefix => ‘NO CRITIC’,

So Alexander actually supports commits which does not necessarily live up to the local standards implemented and configured in Perl::Critic.

Whether polluting your code base for an emergency fix is a good idea, is another discussion and taking Elliot’s example:

## no critic (RegularExpressions::ProhibitEscapedMetacharacters)

Would or at least should do just as fine, I think, without having tried it out.

I treat most of my no critic statements as #TODO points, points to be revisited later. Perl::Critic to me is lot about controlling technical debt, so hooking this mechanism into Subversion is in my opinion a good idea.

Alexanders script does even support different configurations, so you could let your pre-commit policy hook be a check for the most basic things, so your code base does not get too deep in technical debt and emergency fixes become day to day business, Perl::Critic was implemented to avoid that (see also my little Perl::Critic success story)

After all Subversion and Perl::Critic are just tools to help and assist us and our colleagues as developers.