Thanks Adam and Chris. If there is no other objection in the next hours,
I will apply the change tomorrow.
Regards,
Martin
Le 26/10/12 23:42, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) a écrit :
+1 to only keep Find Bugs -- I feel the same way.
Cheers,
Chris
On Oct 26, 2012, at 2:50 AM, Martin Desruisseaux wrote:
Hello all
The current project configuration generates 4 forms of code analysis:
* FindBugs - on code analysis.
* PMD report - an other code analysis.
* CPD report - on code duplication.
* Checkstyle - on coding conventions.
FindBugs and PMD overlaps since they have the same goals. However they use
different approaches:
* FindBugs analyses the compiled *.class files.
* PMD analyses the source *.java files.
In my experience, I have found the FindBugs reports to be more valuable. I found that PMD produces
a larger amount of false positives, for example confusing inner classes called "Double"
(as in java.awt.geom.Point2D.Double) with java.lang.Double. I found that the PMD reports are more
the kind of issues that we can see visually by looking at the code, while I found FindBugs reports
to be "deeper" and less obvious (for example inconsistent synchronization). PMD also
reports some issues that are more about coding conventions, thus overlapping with Checkstyle in
addition to FindBugs.
CPD is a PMD extension for finding code duplications. Like PMD, it works more on the
basis of what the code "looks like" than what the code really is once compiled.
Indeed, the totality of the issues reported by CPD in the sis-utility module [1] are
false positives; I didn't found any real code duplication (the code are extending
different classes, and consequently invoking different methods with different parameters).
Checkstyle is only about coding convention. However the current configuration produces a
large amount of errors, most of them because of lines longer than 80 characters. But
there is other style violations too. However my issue is that Checkstyle seems a bit too
"religious" to me... While I agree that complying to the style rules is good
90% of the time, I believe that some exceptions have justification. In particular, I tend
to consider the symmetry of nature (as emerging from some mathematical expressions) as
more important. Applications working mostly on text or metadata may not experience that
often, but symmetry are a bit more common in geometry or referencing modules. Writing the
code in a way that expose such symmetry, when it can be done in a reasonable way, has
truly helped me many time to spot some bugs in my code. A simple example of what I means
is at https://builds.apache.org/job/sis-jdk7/site/code-format.html but some cases are
more sophisticated.
My usual approach is "comply to the style rule, except for exposing symmetry",
which is quite hard to teach to Checkstyle. Furthermore the Checkstyle configuration in a
Maven multi-modules project seem uneasy [2]. Consequently,
* Given that Checkstyle, CPD and PMD seem to have a very "noise/signal" ration
to me;
* Given that PMD overlaps with both FindBugs and Checkstyle;
If it was just me, I would be tempted to keep only FindBugs and remove the
other analysis tools for making site generation lighter...
What other peoples think?
Martin
[1] https://builds.apache.org/job/sis-jdk7/site/sis-utility/cpd.html
[2]
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-checkstyle-plugin/examples/multi-module-config.html
