Reasoning behind enabled by default linters?

[jalaziz]

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, but what is the reasoning behind the current set of default linters? In particular, why are gofmt and goimports not enabled by default?

We're starting to adopt golangci-lint and one thing that stood out was gofmt was not being enabled by default. After reading the docs, it was not clear to me why the default set was chosen.

[bombsimon]

The simple answer would be that it was decided by the author many years back and has not been changed much to reduce amount of unexpected behaviour or breaking changes. At this point golangci-lint has so many linters and configurations it's hard to do a one-config-fits-all because we have such different needs and I think it's resonable to assume users adopting the tool will also configure it for their needs.

Similar discussions around sensible default has existed for things like exclude-use-default which also shows that some defaults chosen for golangci-lint does not fit everyone.

[jalaziz]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Going further back it seems that golint was being used as a replacement for gofmt and goimports. It was then later disabled by default, but there's not much context as to why.

Thanks for pointing out the exclude-use-default issue. Seems like the defaults are pretty specific to the original needs and not as community standard as we thought. Still a great project though!