ansible-lint should be able to generate comments that match it's own rules

[tremble]

Summary

This is potentially better reported as 2 issues, and I'll happily split it, but the two are tightly coupled...

As mentioned in #3839 the default behaviour of ansible-lint --fix results in comments preceded with just a single space, while the linter wants 2. This in turn means that while fixing one issue it causes a new issue. What adds to the confusion is that the run which re-writes the yaml returns success and 0 errors, while a second run returns the violation.

While I understand the desire to support compatibility with prettier, this results in broken default behaviour. Which is very confusing for the user.

Either:

• There should be a mechanism so that --fix adds 1 or 2 spaces based on the user's preference, preferably with a default that matches the default linting behaviour
• Or the default behaviour of ansible-lint should be updated to allow for single spaces,

However, at the very least ansible-lint should be honestly report that the file it generated does not meet its own rules.

Issue Type

• Bug Report

OS / ENVIRONMENT

ansible-lint --version
ansible-lint 6.22.0 using ansible-core:2.15.5rc1.post0 ansible-compat:4.1.10 ruamel-yaml:0.18.5 ruamel-yaml-clib:0.2.7

ansible installed with git
ansible-lint installed using pip

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

$ cat example.yml 
---
- name: Example task with comment
  assert:
    that:
      - true  # Hello world


$ ansible-lint --fix example.yml
$ ansible-lint --fix example.yml

Desired Behavior

Output of second ansible-lint call should result in 0 errors and 0 changes

Actual Behavior

Output of first ansible-lint --fix call reports 0 errors, but 1 change

Modified 1 files.
Passed: 0 failure(s), 0 warning(s) on 1 files. Last profile that met the validation criteria was 'production'.

Re-running ansible-lint --fix reports 1 violation and 0 changes:

WARNING  Listing 1 violation(s) that are fatal
yaml[comments]: Too few spaces before comment
example.yml:5

Read documentation for instructions on how to ignore specific rule violations.

              Rule Violation Summary               
 count tag            profile rule associated tags 
     1 yaml[comments] basic   formatting, yaml     

[ssbarnea]

This is more of a missing feature as in ability to use the value configured inside .yamllint config file. This bug can be reproduced only with a custom config file like this:

---
rules:
  comments:
    min-spaces-from-content: 2

A PR to improve the linter formatting ability would be welcomed here, but I do not think that the team will have the time to implement this change.

[tremble]

This is more of a missing feature as in ability to use the value configured inside .yamllint config file. This bug can be reproduced only with a custom config file like this:

My .yamllint file doesn't mention min-spaces-from-content:

---
rules:
  indentation:
    ignore: &default_ignores |
      # automatically generated, we can't control it
      changelogs/changelog.yaml
      # Will be gone when we release and automatically reformatted
      changelogs/fragments/*
  document-start:
    ignore: *default_ignores
  line-length:
    ignore: *default_ignores
    max: 160 

ignore-from-file: .gitignore

It's possible I've got another config file around somewhere, but I'm not sure where

yamllint                1.29.0

[raphendyr]

I noticed that the ansible-lint includes it's own yamllint config. The min-space-from-content: 1 comes from it: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-lint/blob/main/src/ansiblelint/yaml_utils.py#L49-L70

[ssbarnea]

@Qalthos Please implement a change that disables the fix option when min-spaces-from-content is overridden in yamllint config, as we do not support this. We will later add the other 2-3 formatting options that we do not support for various reasons like ruamel and prettier limitations.

Related #4118