We held the second OpenLint office hours on 8 October. The recording, summary and full transcript are up, and the agenda is on GitHub.
The theme this week was setting the table. Our goal right now isn’t new features. It’s getting OpenLint open for business: running on par with Spectral, with governance, so the people who depend on it can switch.
The specification
The specification and its JSON Schema are up for review in openlint/spec#2. It documents the ruleset format as it works today, without changing it. If you have feedback, now is the time; we’ll merge in a couple of weeks.
Backwards compatibility took most of the hour. Everyone agrees that every ruleset that works in Spectral today has to keep working. Jakub Rożek pushed us further: compatibility also covers the JavaScript API that editors embed, and the lint results themselves, the same messages and ranges from the same ruleset. Measuring that takes a conformance suite, and that conversation continues in discussion #12. We also need to decide what our first version number is.
The code
Telemetry is gone. Phil Sturgeon’s rename and cleanup merged in openlint#1 and continues in #6. Jakub is upgrading Node in #7, and Miguel Quintero sent his first pull request, upgrading TypeScript, in #8. Next comes supply chain health, cleaning up vendorisms, and a migration path off Spectral.
New discussions
People are bringing real needs to the table:
- Dimitri van Hees asks for case-insensitive matching (#27), so a rule can check for an
api-versionheader without listing every spelling. - Andrzej Jarzyna raises custom functions and an expression language (#28), so rulesets don’t have to run someone else’s JavaScript.
- Andrzej also proposes comparing two versions of a document (#29) to catch breaking changes.
Running the project
Proposals for governance and a maintainers page are open, and everyone who comes to office hours is listed as a contributor. We’re on Open Collective, waiting on Open Source Europe to accept us as our fiscal host. I’m also drafting a simple way to disclose AI use on issues and pull requests, rated from 1 (none) to 5 (fully automated). This post was drafted with Claude; I’d rate it a 4.
Get involved
The roadmap shows what’s in progress and what’s still unclaimed, and the changelog shows what moved each week. Pick something up, start a discussion, or join us at office hours on Thursday.