Big Changes in Precious v0.4.0

I just released version 0.4.0 of precious, my code quality meta-tool for configuring a collection of linters and tidiers for a project.

The headline change for this release is that command invocation configuration has changed, with the old run_mode and chdir keys being deprecated. Don’t worry, you can safely upgrade to this release, as the old config keys still work and do not cause precious to emit any warning yet¹.

Also, precious still works the same way by default as it always did. It runs the command once per file from the project root, passing the command the file’s path relative to that root.

The problem with the old configuration is that it didn’t really capture the full scope of possible ways to invoke commands. Specifically, it has a few shortcomings:

• You couldn’t pass absolute paths to the command no matter what you did.
• You couldn’t run a command per directory and pass any path to it except a dot (.) or no path at all.
• You couldn’t run a command once and pass file or directory paths to the command.
• You couldn’t run a command once from any directory except the project root.

All of these cases are addressed with the new system, which offers three command invocation keys, invoke, working_dir, and path_args. The documentation in the project’s repo has been updated. There’s also documentation on upgrading to v0.4.0 as well as docs on every valid combination of invocation config options.

Please install the new release and take it for a spin. If you encounter any problems please file a GitHub issue.