Description

Edited December 8th, 2022: updated to include @aaronadamsCA's #6019 (comment) and @robertknight's #6014 (comment) to this proposal.

Context

Right now, no config in the following list of configs provided with typescript-eslint includes any other config in that list:

• plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended
• plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended-requiring-type-checking
• plugin:@typescript-eslint/strict

That means if you want, say, the strictest, you must enable all three (https://typescript-eslint.io/docs/linting/configs):

{
  "extends": [
    "plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended",
    "plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended-requiring-type-checking",
    "plugin:@typescript-eslint/strict"
  ]
}

That's very inconvenient -and sometimes even confusing- for end users.

Breaking Change: Including Lesser Configs

Proposal: how about we have each config in that list also include any previous config in the list? That way if you want, say, the strict ruleset, you would only need to enable it, not recommended-* ones:

{
  "extends": [
    "plugin:@typescript-eslint/strict"
  ]
}

Associated Enhancement: More Delineated Configs

We've received occasional user feedback (e.g. #6014 (comment)) that our recommended rulesets also include some stylistic rules. The ESLint community has generally moved away from the old 2010s-era eslint-config-airbnb practice of doing that. I agree that we should separate those out.

This proposal suggests we split our recommended configurations into:

• Functional rule configurations, for best best practices and code correctness:
  • recommended: Recommended rules that you can drop in without additional configuration.
  • recommended-type-checked: Additional recommended rules that require type information.
  • strict: Additional strict rules that can also catch bugs but are more opinionated than recommended rules.
  • strict-type-checked: Additional strict rules require type information.
• Stylistic rule configurations:
  • stylistic: Stylistic rules you can drop in without additional configuration.
  • stylistic-type-checked: Additional stylistic rules that require type information.

You can see the equivalent code changes in #5251.

Description of Breaking Changes

In other words, there are three changes being proposed here:

• Reworking what's existing in the existing recommended, recommended-requiring-type-checking, and strict configs: this is a breaking change
• Adding new strict-type-checked, sylistic, and stylistic-type-checked configurations: this is not a breaking change
• Renaming recommended-requiring-type-checking to recommended-type-checked: this would be a breaking change, except recommended-requiring-type-checking, will be left as an alias for its new config name, recommended-type-checked.
  • We'll eventually breaking change away the old alias - perhaps in v7.

Thanks @shawnmcknight for a great Twitter discussion on phrasing the breaking changes!