RFE: warn about disables using identifiers, promote symbolic names

[scop]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Would be nice to have a way to pylint emit warnings for pylint disable=... lines that use message identifiers as opposed to their symbolic names in code. The symbolic names can mostly be just understood when reading related code, whereas identifiers require one to look them up.

Describe the solution you'd like

A warning message if one uses for example # pylint disable=W0612 containing a suggestion to use disable=unused-variable instead.

Additional context

I think I can have a look at implementing this sometime unless someone beats me to it, but posting this RFE to probe acceptability/desirability first.

[PCManticore]

Hey @scop

Thank you for creating an issue! We already support this pattern with use-symbolic-message-instead. It is disabled by default though as it is an informational check, so you have to enable it explicitly:

python -m pylint a.py --enable=use-symbolic-message-instead
************* Module a
a.py:1:0: I0023: Id 'C0114' is used to disable 'missing-module-docstring' message emission (use-symbolic-message-instead)

[scop]

Oh, cool. However informational messages don't seem to cause a nonzero exit status, which I would like for this message. Is there a way to accomplish that?

[PCManticore]

There isn't a way to accomplish this I'm afraid, other than promoting this check to a different category in pylint itself.

[scop]

Ok, filed #3251 for the confurability :)

[dbaty]

For the record, a colleague of mine (@xavfernandez) recently released a pylint plugin that registers such a warning message. The documentation is a bit short for now, but basically one just needs to:

1. Add pylint-message-id to your requirements.

2. And add the following line to the .pylintrc:

   load-plugins=pylint_message_id
   

And you get the following warnings:

file.py:5: [C9001(numerical-message-id), ] Numerical message identifier used: W0123 - use eval-used instead

[xavfernandez]

For the record, a colleague of mine (@xavfernandez) recently released a pylint plugin that registers such a warning message.

I did not know about use-symbolic-message-instead 😿 .

Since then, I've opened #3363 and its patch-plugin pylint-strict-informational so this becomes:

1. Add pylint-strict-informational to your requirements.

2. And add the following lines to the .pylintrc:

   load-plugins=pylint_strict_informational
   enable =
       use-symbolic-message-instead
   

[scop]

Very nice, thanks!