What is your opinion on fractor?

TYPO3 Questions
1

I recently started to add more assistance tools to my stack (like rector/rector-typo3 and fractor) and i have mixed feelings. Rector does a good job mostly but fractor seems to be is a different story.

It changes many whitespaces all over the place but does not find many real issues (even though they exist). When using it on a large extension, it fatals in various situations because it can not handle one bad xml attribute in xliff for example (wtf, how about fixing that?).

It does not even tell me the file it encountered the fatal. No flag (-v) helps with that. I only know there is SOMETHING wrong in a xml file. The fatal - funnily enough - happens because of white-space formatting (fractor tries to do str_repeat(’ ', -4)). The stack trace only tells me about the error but not the origin.

Furthermore i had bad experiences with some extensions related to that specific vendor (FriendsOfTYPO3).

What is your opinion? I would like to know before adding it to more places.

2

They don’t check their dependencies. The simonschaufi/pretty-xml package us buggy and can not format xml, it decreases indentation values below 0 all the time because its so badly implemented. Can you trust such a tool, if they add such deps?

3

The XML Formatter fails if a XML Comment contains a CDATA section. I can not create a issue in any of the trackers but i would like to tell the author, i don’t have time for a merge request right now. But this analysis might help someone or something else

Update: Forget about that, i got confused by the github UI, issues created!

4

Okay, my temporary assessment is:

  • It fails with XML or even breaks the XML (Adding whitespace)
  • mainly does code-formatting, and that’s not the point, makes analyzing issues harder

It does not make my life easier, it makes it harder. I am going to disable this for the moment.

5

That quiet a rant you got going there :laughing:

Ran TYPO3 Rector (https://www.typo3-rector.com/) on a project with all kinds of files. Reviewed the diff afterwards (with git) and committed. Total time used for a upgrade from TYPO3 12-13: 1 hour

Does a issue exist? If a bug/case is not known it can’t be fixed. At least be the reporter to the project :victory_hand:

6

Rector does a good job, i agree. I am not sure about fractor and wanted to hear/read, what you think about it. Yes i created the issues once i got over my confusion with the github UI. Thanks for sharing your experience!