Linting, formating and typechecking tools

[marcus-oscarsson]

We are using Flake8 and Pylint and Black for linting and formatting. Many projects including flask have switched to ruff and are also using pyright (for static type checking).

We currently don't have any tool for static type checking and I think that could be worth adding.

Ruff is supposed to be a drop in replacement for Black and Flake8 (I'm not sure about Pylint) but apparently much faster. I'm not sure its worth switching to Ruff, perhaps any of you have some experience with it and can give us your opinion.

@oldfielj-ansto recently added both tools to the mxcube-video-streamer project which was very welcome :),

[fabcor-maxiv]

I agree with migrating to ruff for linting (or ruff+black).

I agree with adding type checks to our toolchain. I have never used pyright, I have used mypy quite a lot. Whatever the tool for type checks, I feel like there might be a lot of things to fix for the checks to pass.

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But for the record: I am still a bit wary of ruff, because the tool is very new compared to the tools it is meant to replace that have matured for many years. I can't deny that ruff got very popular very quickly so that must be for a reason. And of course, if it simplifes our toolchain, then it is a good thing.

[fabcor-maxiv]

Migration to Ruff for linting and formatting: #1555.

My impression is that we still might need additional tools besides Ruff for linting. As far as I can tell Ruff only does static analysis (it does not actually import or run any code). On the other hand some tools like Pylint are much more thorough and are able to do a deeper analysis of the code (partly because it does import the code). But we are not there yet, for now Ruff covers at least as much as we had before migrating to Ruff.

[fabcor-maxiv]

Ruff team is also working on a checker for type hints. There is no timeline for when it will be ready.