January 3-9, 2021 in Darker: Community Engagement and Technical Discussions

[akaihola]

This week, our community focused on addressing user concerns and engaging in technical discussions to improve Darker's functionality across different development environments. We made progress in understanding and resolving issues related to isort behavior and Visual Studio Code integration.

A significant discussion revolved around isort's behavior with virtualenvs (#105). We identified that running Darker from a user environment while isort is in a project's virtualenv can lead to unexpected results. This insight highlighted the importance of running Darker from the project's virtualenv to ensure consistent behavior. We recognized the need to document this in our project guidelines to help users avoid similar issues in the future.

We also delved deeper into the challenges of integrating Darker with Visual Studio Code's format-on-save functionality (#104). Our investigation revealed that VS Code calls formatters with specific arguments, including --diff and --quiet. This discovery helped explain some of the inconsistencies users were experiencing. We're continuing to explore solutions to improve Darker's compatibility with VS Code's formatting workflow.

Additionally, we began addressing a critical issue where Darker crashes when GIT_DIR is set to a relative path (#112). This bug, discovered during attempts to use Darker in a git commit hook, highlighted the need for our tool to be more robust in handling various git configurations. We're considering several approaches to resolve this, including normalizing git environment variables or simplifying our directory handling logic.

---

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