I strongly disagree with these changes and the fact this is even a part of the linter. It completely disagrees with the specification (https://www.flake8rules.com/rules/W391.html), which says there should be exactly one blank line at the end of a file. After this change, there are 0 blanklines at the end. They either need to learn how to count or change their specification. I also find it more difficult to read without that blankline.

I didn't introduce this change. It has been enabled in fba8e59. Currently, the linter on the develop branch fails because of this: https://github.com/sagemath/sage/actions/runs/4160169660/jobs/7196912078, which also make it fail for all PRs based on it. So can we please get this in?

I'm sorry, but that isn't really an argument. I could just as well introduce a PR that removes that as a requirement with one person agreeing to it as I don't recall us setting that as a standard. If I missed it, then I will just grumble quietly. However, I have created a topic on sage-devel asking about what "one blankline" means: https://groups.google.com/u/2/g/sage-devel/c/SsghcSi6mfw

If there is a controversy, it should rather be debated on sage-devel, no ? In my opinion, it is the implementation that really says the expected meaning of these warnings. I agree that the description given by flake8rules is wrong. The one in
https://pycodestyle.pycqa.org/en/2.9.0/intro.html#error-codes is not precise either.

This is the implementation: https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/blob/b22b672a1a53f1ef35c4f4689c674d66a24138ed/pycodestyle.py#L250-L253

Okay, I think I understand. They are counting the number of newline characters at the end, which are really "end-of-line" characters. For example, hexdump -C src/sage/algebras/all.py yields

00000890  67 65 62 72 61 73 2e 63  6c 75 73 74 65 72 5f 61  |gebras.cluster_a|
000008a0  6c 67 65 62 72 61 27 2c  20 27 43 6c 75 73 74 65  |lgebra', 'Cluste|
000008b0  72 41 6c 67 65 62 72 61  27 29 0a 0a 6c 61 7a 79  |rAlgebra')..lazy|
000008c0  5f 69 6d 70 6f 72 74 28  27 73 61 67 65 2e 61 6c  |_import('sage.al|
000008d0  67 65 62 72 61 73 2e 79  61 6e 67 69 61 6e 27 2c  |gebras.yangian',|
000008e0  20 27 59 61 6e 67 69 61  6e 27 29 0a              | 'Yangian').|
000008ec

So my misunderstanding comes from what they are specifying as a "blankline" should be newline character.

I will just grumble quietly from here-on-out about git noting that there is no blankline and not being able to scroll that one extra line. Sorry for the trouble.

Documentation preview for this PR is ready! 🎉
Built with commit: 94160a4

No worries! Some IDE's have the ability to add a virtual new line at the end of the file. This might be something for you ;-).

Will merge this PR now to fix the CI pipeline.

about git noting that there is no blankline

git does not complain about missing blank lines. It would complain about a file ending without a newline character at the end.

about git noting that there is no blankline

git does not complain about missing blank lines. It would complain about a file ending without a newline character at the end.

I remember it used to do so. I checked this now and it doesn't do what it used to do previously, unless it was my editor not putting newline characters at the end (which I highly doubt).