Preserve comments mode

[spacebat]

It would be nice if ruboclean had a flag that would preserve comments immediately preceding a cop entry in .rubocop.yml, and any that are inline in the entry. We have a lot of comments in our config explaining why things are disabled and so on, and I'm hesitant to delete them.

[lxxxvi]

Hi @spacebat 👋

Thank you for your issue! I think that's a great idea. I'd even make this the default behaviour, and add a flag if we want to have the comments removed. Let me try that.

[lxxxvi]

Hi @spacebat

Thank you again for reporting that issue. Moments ago I released https://github.com/lxxxvi/ruboclean/releases/tag/v0.4.0 that introduces the --preserve-comment flag.

However, for the moment I was only able to implement to preserve preceding comments, not inline comments.

Please note that, against what I said earlier, this option is not the default. You have to explicitly provide it in order to keep the comments.

[tylerwillingham]

--preserve-comments as an argument name implies to me that comments will remain completely untouched. Unfortunately it appears that's not the case.

--preceeding-comments-only or --permit-preceeding-comments feels more descriptive of the current behavior.

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Count me in as an interested voicing in completely preserving comments as-is. Inline comments are way more useful for our rules than moving the comments up to the top of the cop block

[lxxxvi]

Hi @tylerwillingham

Thank you for your comment! I agree, the flag name can be misleading, I like your proposal --permit-preceeding-comments though. Would you be interested in changing it and opening a PR?

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Regarding the inline comments:

The main reason why I haven't implemented it (yet) is because it actually seems to be quite difficult to do.
The problem is that Psych ignores comments when parsing a YAML file, and therefore we'd have to implement some sort of a YAML parser ourselves in order to remember where comments came from. I'd like to avoid this. Let me know if you have ideas how to implement it.