Introduction
************


What is Pylint?
===============

Pylint is a tool that checks for errors in Python code, tries to
enforce a coding standard and looks for code smells. It can also look
for certain type errors, it can recommend suggestions about how
particular blocks can be refactored and can offer you details about
the code's complexity.

Other similar projects would include pychecker (now defunct),
pyflakes, flake8, and mypy. The default coding style used by Pylint is
close to PEP 8.

Pylint will display a number of messages as it analyzes the code and
it can also be used for displaying some statistics about the number of
warnings and errors found in different files. The messages are
classified under various categories such as errors and warnings.

Last but not least, the code is given an overall mark, based on the
number and severity of the warnings and errors.


What Pylint is not?
===================

What Pylint says is not to be taken as gospel and Pylint isn't smarter
than you are: it may warn you about things that you have
conscientiously done.

Pylint tries hard to report as few false positives as possible for
errors, but it may be too verbose with warnings. That's for example
because it tries to detect things that may be dangerous in a context,
but are not in others, or because it checks for some things that you
don't care about. Generally, you shouldn't expect Pylint to be totally
quiet about your code, so don't necessarily be alarmed if it gives you
a hell lot of messages for your project!

The best way to tackle pylint's verboseness is to:

* enable or disable the messages or message categories that you want
  to be activated or not for when pylint is analyzing your code. This
  can be done easily through a command line flag. For instance,
  disabling all convention messages is simple as a "--disable=C"
  option added to pylint command.

* create a custom configuration file, tailored to your needs. You can
  generate one using pylint's command "--generate-rcfile".
