Additional Help and Background Information¶

When crafting an issue message, it is sometimes difficult to strike a balance between providing you with enough information to fix the issue and not producing a big wall of text. Besides when you first encounter an issue, you might need more information than on subsequent encounters.

To help solve this, we have now introduced extended help messages. Extended help messages are already available for quite a few messages for all supported analysis tools. If an issue has such a help message, it is marked with an info icon (see below). The help message usually has some background and suggestions on how to fix the issue:

Consistent Issue Messages¶

Scrutinizer runs a lot of open-source analysis tools (JSHint, PHP Mess Detector, PHP Code Sniffer, and some more). These tools have been written by many different authors. Given the high number of authors, it is natural that messages produced by one tool are written in a different language than others; some are a bit harsher, others more encouraging; some are a bit short and others a bit lengthy.

To provide you with a joyful and consistent experience across Scrutinizer, we have already re-worked a couple of hundred of the frequently occurring issues (in total, Scrutinizer has a couple of thousand different issues). For these issues, instead of displaying the original message, Scrutinizer now shows you a different message which is more encouraging and generally aimed at helping you to fix the issue.

If you run into a message which you find confusing or which needs more explanation, just open an issue on scrutinizer-ci/scrutinizer and we will take a look at it.

Happy developing :)