Lint with ruff

[rossbar]

Add the ruff linter to the development workflow.

Includes basic configuration as well as some minor tweaks/improvements to pass the linter. The configuration is minimal and reflects the original pytest-pep8 configuration.

[msschwartz21]

In a lot of other workflows, we cache the python environment to speed up action times https://github.com/marketplace/actions/cache. Would that be appropriate to incorporate here?

[rossbar]

IMO it's probably not worth it for this case - this should really only install 2 pkgs (updated pip + ruff), neither of which is particularly large thus is unlikely to be a bottleneck.

[msschwartz21]

Just to clarify, this just generates a report and does not actually change any files. The action will fail if the linting standards are not met?

[rossbar]

Correct. ruff does have the option to automatically "fix" some subset of errors, though in my experimentation with it some of the autofixes were not correct or otherwise overly aggressive. There are ways to control this in the ruff configs (see e.g. unfixable), but IMO it'd be easiest to start off without it. We can always revisit this once we gain more experience with the linter in place.

[msschwartz21]

One additional question, can you tell if .pylintrc is being used by anything or if we can delete it?

[rossbar]

One additional question, can you tell if .pylintrc is being used by anything or if we can delete it?

Nice catch, I missed that file. We could remove it as pylint is used explicitly anywhere, and ruff covers all the same bases but is much, much faster.

I'd vote to leave it there for now as it sets up additional linting beyond what ruff is currently configured to do, and we can use it as a guidepost for enabling more features in ruff.