I didn't realize our .golangci.yml had abunch of rules commented out. That seems weird. And makes the linter file harder to read: I don't think anyone really needs to know what rules we explicitly aren't using, that's implied by them not being in the file to begin with.

Can we just remove them?

So we no longer need gofmt because our linter handles it? We should change this to be a call out to the golangci-lint commandline utility then.

See the 'lint' target in the same Makefile.

Ah gotcha - but is golangci-lint going to format poorly formatted code?

No. It will check if the format is correct. That's what the current fmt Makefile target does:

This PR does not introduce any change in that regard.

Removing fmt here means that when people run make locally, they will no longer get errors for formatting errors. Considering the linter takes less tan 2 seconds to run, I suggest running it for make all.
If someone does not want to run it, they can do make test directly.

What do you think?

fmt is removed here because the Makefile target fmt is removed in this PR. We can add lint in this target, but that will require contributors to have golangci-lint installed before running make. I think it is better not to require having golangci-lint in order to make cobra. At the same time, it does not make sense to have an specific make target for one single linter but not for others. Overall, the users/developers interested in contributing code will always want to make lint test clean.

When I started contributing I would do make and think everything was ok. It was only later that I realized this did not include the linters, so now I run make lint manually.

But I agree that making golangc-lint a requirement may be annoying. But it will also be annoying to only notice the bad formatting once CI is run...

I'm not sure what is best...

IMHO modifying the sources and building cobra are not directly related to contributing code back to the upstream. That is, users might want to use and modify this open source tool regardless of the linting rules enforced in this repository. From this point of view, the requirement/need to use golangci-lint belongs to contributing guidelines: https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md. Everyone should read the contributing guidelines before submitting a PR to a project.