Comment by zem
Comment by zem 2 days ago
this is very much in line with the unix philosophy - it delegates formatting to ruff and simply provides a unified front end that calls out to the right specialized tool. think of it as a makefile.
Comment by zem 2 days ago
this is very much in line with the unix philosophy - it delegates formatting to ruff and simply provides a unified front end that calls out to the right specialized tool. think of it as a makefile.
One can find repos using `make format` / `make lint`/ `make typecheck` / or similar
I remember David Beazley mentioning that code with Makefiles were relatively easier to analyze based on ~Terabyte of C++ code and no internet connection (pycon 2014) https://youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8
That `make format` command was not defined by the Make developers, but by the team using Make in their project. They picked their favorite formatter and defined a shortcut. In this case, the uv developers are forcing the command on everyone, and they're using it to cross-promote their own formatting tool.
They are not forcing anything on anyone. You can decide to never run `uv format` and ruff won’t even be installed.
You can use uv without ruff. You can use ruff without uv. You can invoke ruff yourself if that’s what you want. Or use any other formatter.
I don’t think I understand what your complaint is.
If I want to call ruff, I can do so myself. Why should I want to call it through uv?
If you want to call ruff directly, this doesn't change anything. It's a purely optional feature.
However, to answer the question generally: people want this for the same reason that most people call `cargo fmt` instead of running rustfmt[1] directly: it's a better developer experience, particularly if you don't already think of code formatting as an XY-type problem ("I want to format my code, and now I have to discover a formatter" versus "I want to format my code, and my tool already has that").
Or maybe some prefer random versions of dependencies being downloaded and running over our code?
A better example might be: in good ol' days when we were formatting with troff(1), passing arguments to the command line invoked other programs like eqn(1) and tbl(1).