Having multiple enable/disable in pylintrc

[hydrargyrum]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Using command-line, it's possible to run something like:

pylint -d "*" -e W -d invalid-name

which is interpret by pylint as:

• disable all messages except that...
• ... enable all "W" messages except that...
• ... disable "invalid-name" (which is in the "W" group)

or in other words "only W that are not invalid-name"

and this is a cool feature!

However, the same behavior cannot be achieved using an rcfile:

configparser.DuplicateOptionError: While reading from 'lint' [line 4]: option 'disable' in section 'MESSAGES CONTROL' already exists

Describe the solution you'd like

Since the rcfile parsing engine does not allowing having multiple times the same key, either switching to another parsing engine or having a new option like:

[MESSAGES CONTROL]
messages = -*,
    +W,
    -invalid-name

or

[MESSAGES CONTROL]
enable = -*,
    W,
    -invalid-name

or

[MESSAGES CONTROL]
messages = -*,
    W,
    -invalid-name

Potential inspiration: rdiff-backup's "filelist" options.

[mattwala]

We have an ad-hoc solution to this problem, by defining a new YAML-based format for rcfiles that lets you repeat options. The main driver is:

https://gitlab.tiker.net/inducer/ci-support/-/blob/master/run-pylint.py

Example rcfile: https://gitlab.tiker.net/inducer/ci-support/-/blob/master/.pylintrc-default.yml

It would be nice, however, if this feature was fully supported by Pylint.

cc: @inducer

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

We can either have #3696 or this one but not both.

[DanielNoord]

This is a limitation in both toml and ini files. Let's not try to write our own tomllib and just say this this is (sadly) a won't fix.

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

Let's have #3696 then.