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.

Contributing

A quick way to test if some syntax is valid from a pure reStructuredText point of view, one case use docutils's pseudoxml writer, like:

$ docutils --writer=pseudoxml tests/fixtures/xpass/role-in-code-sample.rst
<document source="tests/fixtures/xpass/role-in-code-sample.rst">
    <paragraph>
        Found in the pandas documentation, this is valid:
    <bullet_list bullet="*">
        <list_item>
            <paragraph>
                A pandas class (in the form
                <literal>
                    :class:`pandas.Series`
                )
        <list_item>
            <paragraph>
                A pandas method (in the form
                <literal>
                    :meth:`pandas.Series.sum`
                )
        <list_item>
            <paragraph>
                A pandas function (in the form
                <literal>
                    :func:`pandas.to_datetime`
                )
    <paragraph>
        it's documenting roles using code samples (double backticks).

Releasing

First test with friends projects by running:

sh download-more-tests.sh
python -m pytest

Bump the version in sphinxlint.py, commit, tag, push:

git tag v0.6.5
git push
git push --tags

To release on PyPI run:

python -m pip install --upgrade build twine
python -m build
python -m twine upload dist/*

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.