It's frustrating when useful tools refuse to work together nicely. In the past I've experienced conflicts between black and flake8 that made it impossible to commit via my default commit hooks. Now I'm seeing the same behaviour with black and reorder-python-imports.
In short, almost a year ago now github user maxwell-k reported that black release 24.1.0 had introduced an incompatibility with reorder-python-imports by starting to require a blank line after a module docstring. In the discussion on the bug report the black crew make the reasonable-seeming point that it's black's job to determine the disposition of whitespace, and that reorder-python-imports should do what its name implies and nothing more. This would respect the long-standing Unix tradition that each tool should as far as possible perform a single function.
Unfortunately, when elagil raised the same issue with the reorder-python-imports developers, with a request to make their project usable with black (ably supported by maxwell-k), they received a response which I can only (avoiding the use of expletives) describe as disappointing:
anything is possible. will it happen here: no
In my opinion this uncompromising attitude displays the worst kind of arrogance from a developer, and I frankly fail to see who benefits from this refusal to bend (except perhaps a developer unwilling to work further on a project or set it free). The net consequence from my own point of view is that I'll no longer be using reorder-python-imports, nor recommending it.
The situation remains unchanged. Life's too short to persuade donkeys to move. On the plus side, research into solving this irritation led me to start working with ruff, which provides the functionality of both utilities in a single rather faster tool. It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Goodbye, donkeys!
