What's the relationship between a lint group and merged linters?

[hippietrail]

I see there's no occurrence of the term "group" in merge_linters.rs
It seems they might not be related, which is maybe unintuitive. You'd expected that merging linters would create a lint group.

Maybe lint group means a very specific kind of group?
Either way it should be documented, at least in the comments of the two concepts in the source.

Ran into this while trying to add a pair of mutually-exclusive rules: sneaked→snuck and snuck→sneaked

I filed a draft PR with the work in progress or anyone to look over: #2209

[elijah-potter]

The merge_linters! macro was introduced before the lint_group was mutable. Once upon a time, both the lint_group and the merge_linters modules worked entirely using Rust macros, and thus were not mutable at runtime. The lint_group is now mutable, but the merge_linter module hasn't caught up yet.

To be more specific, the merge_linter! macro defines a new implementation of the Linter trait that combines the output of the provided children. You can use cargo expand to see what that looks like.

[hippietrail]

Hmm I think there's some things to think about and decide for how to group linters and preferences.
I made a new issue: #2396
#2323 is also related.