Revisit using pre-commit.ci

[dstansby]

If I'm makng a simple change to markdown, such as in #462, I use the GitHub web interface for speed. This can often result in pre-commit failing however, because the markdown isn't correctly linted. This then breaks the benefit of using the GitHub website for speed, because I have no way of automatically fixing the linting and have to go back to local development on my laptop.

To improve this I'd like to propose we revisit using pre-commit.ci to lint this repo. This would provide a mechanism of automatically making pre-commit fixes on demand, by posting a "pre-commit.ci autofix" comment in a PR.

In #196 we very briefly discussed and decided not to use it because it's not available for private repositories. One mitigation to this is we can still have a GitHub actions linting job, so when someone sets up a private repo from this template there's still a linting CI job that is run.

So I'd like to advocate for using pre-commit.ci for this repo. Thoughts?

[samcunliffe]

In #196 we very briefly discussed and decided not to use it because it's not available for private repositories. One mitigation to this is we can still have a GitHub actions linting job, so when someone sets up a private repo from this template there's still a linting CI job that is run.

Briefly from memory the decision to turn it off was:

1. We didn't want to have different tools in the main tooling repo than those in the template.
2. pre-commit.ci is not free for closed-source: we want to encourage maximum takeup of the template amongst UCL researchers, and a good portion of projects either start out closed until some research outcome is published, or stay closed-source.

I'm actually OK with violating 1. We could have pre-commit.ci on the repo, but not the template.

If I read you correctly, you're suggesting that we make the template a bit smarter and have it choose whether to lint based on a cookiecutter option?

[paddyroddy]

I'm happy to have it on the repo, but not the template

[dstansby]

I'm definitely only proposing for the repo here, not the template.

I'm not suggesting we alter the template - just that we add pre-commit.ci to this repo. In order to make sure we keep eating our own dog food, my suggestion is we could keep the GitHub actions linting running on this repo too. But that would duplicate linting CI on this repo 🤔 I'm not sure which way round is best...

[paddyroddy]

Installed and tested here #464 (comment)

[paddyroddy]

Sorry I'm turning this off. It is impossible to turn off autoupdates pre-commit-ci/issues#83. See the issues/concerns: #479, #482

[dstansby]

@paddyroddy could you post the issue you've found on this thread? I think they're spread around several PRs/issues at the moment, and I'm struggling to find them all 😄

[samcunliffe]

Why not taking alphas?

[paddyroddy]

Sorry I'm turning this off. It is impossible to turn off autoupdates pre-commit-ci/issues#83. See the issues/concerns: #479, #482

It's here @dstansby

[paddyroddy]

Also doesn't update the template

[dstansby]

I can follow links, but I'm asking if you could repeat the problems here so it's easier for us to see what they are all in one place 🙏