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For package maintainers and hackage trustees
Checkmate is a small program to generate human-readable checklists from
a given patch (or pull request). Leave CHECK comments (that are the same
fashion as FIXME or TODO comments); then Checkmate detects when a diff
touches some code scopes having any CHECK comments, and lists the checks.
It helps contributors and reviewers to remind matters that require attention
when a part of the code is changed.
Let's say there's a dictionary, and we should update the manual when a key
is added to or removed from it:
The above example may be artificial, but suppose lines of the dictionary are
lengthy. Such tasks should be done outside of the source code repository
so that they cannot be automated by simply eliminating code duplicates.
Contributors and reviewers altogether are easy to forget about such tasks.
To remind peers of such tasks, Checkmate detects CHECK comments like the above
example when a relevant code block is touched and show peers a checklist.
How does Checkmate list only relevant checks to a diff? It currently doesn't
have any language-specific algorithms, but only a language-agnostic heuristics
on indented blocks.
Suppose the following diff:
Since it touched a code block with a CHECK comment, Checkmate generates
the following checklist:
Suppose a patch touches only code blocks without any CHECK comments too, e.g.:
Since the touched block doesn't have any CHECK comments, Checkmate generates
an empty checklist.
Note that it doesn't parse code's semantics, but only scans blocks through
indentation. Even if a block is wrapped in curly braces without indentation,
it isn't counted as a block.
Some checks may need to be listed for a whole directory. Checkmate recognizes
files named .check or CHECK in a directory and include checks in that to
the checklist if any file in the directory are changed. Its syntax is basically
a simple bullet list and a bullet can be */-/+/CHECK or digits followed
by ./), e.g.:
We provide an official Linux x86_64 binary for every release. See also
the latest release. Note that official binaries are distributed as
statically-linked standalone executable, and they aren't gzipped. Download and
give an +x permission; then it's ready.
On the other platforms you can download and install using Haskell Cabal
or Stack since source tarballs also are distributed on Hackage:
Note: if you experience an error like ConnectionFailure
Network.BSD.getProtocolByName: does not exist (no such protocol name: tcp)
on Debian/Ubuntu Linux, try to install netbase package.
(Read this explanation for details.)
Since Checkmate usually is executed as a part of CI build, we show examples
for widely-used CI services.
All examples assume the environment variables are defined:
GITHUB_TOKEN contains the access token to leave comments on a
corresponding GitHub repository. See also GitHub's official article
about personal API tokens.
CHECKMATE_DOWNLOAD_URL contains the download link to the prebuilt binary
of the latest release, i.e.:
You can run checkmate github command with explicit arguments:
If you're using GitHub Enterprise on premise use --endpoint option.
Further reading: checkmate github --help.