Violations vs References

[baweaver]

One issue that was brought up when I was trying to rewrite parts of this tool elsewhere was that it only highlights violations, meaning any package overrides declaring something a dependency or an exception will cause that reference to not be highlighted.

Eventually this tool should transition to using all references from Packwerk and distinguishing between current violations and "allowed" violations so we can get a fuller picture of the codebase.

That all said, would be willing to chip in on that note and design a solution later.

[martinemde]

I definitely agree that this would be useful. I've been shortcutting lately by removing dependencies on the packs I'm looking at. In the long run, being able to show that code without hacking the package.yml would be a better solution.

[Catsuko]

This would be very cool to see with the access patterns shape too. Being able to see the access patterns for a package once refactored etc

[baweaver]

I may be building a side-repo based on some of the stuff that you were working on in https://github.com/Shopify/packwerk/pull/410/files @Catsuko. I can let folks know once it's a bit more matured, but one thing that came up was that Packwerk is really two distinct tools:

1. Reference Extractor - Find all references, links, meta-information about code in a repo
2. Rules Engine - Violations, dependencies, layers, etc etc to enforce on top of said references

I'm inclined to make a focused tool for the first item, but it'll take me a bit.