Skip to content
Back to top
View this page

# Gauging changes

A lot of the time, your change will affect formatting and/or performance. Quantifying these changes is hard, so we have tooling to help make it easier.

It’s recommended you evaluate the quantifiable changes your Black formatting modification causes before submitting a PR. Think about if the change seems disruptive enough to cause frustration to projects that are already “Black-formatted”.

## diff-shades

diff-shades is a tool that runs Black across a list of open-source projects recording the results. The main highlight feature of diff-shades is being able to compare two revisions of Black. This is incredibly useful as it allows us to see what exact changes will occur, say merging a certain PR.

For more information, please see the diff-shades documentation.

### CI integration

diff-shades is also the tool behind the “diff-shades results comparing …” comments on PRs. The project has a GitHub Actions workflow that analyzes and compares two revisions of Black according to these rules:

| Baseline revision | Target revision
--- | --- | ---
On PRs | latest commit on PR base branch | PR commit with `main` merged
On pushes (main only) | latest PyPI version | the pushed commit

For pushes to main, there’s only one analysis job named `preview-new-changes` where the preview style is used for all projects.

For PRs they get one more analysis job: `assert-no-changes`. It’s similar to `preview-new-changes` but runs with the stable code style. It will fail if changes were made. This makes sure code won’t be reformatted again and again within the same year in accordance to Black’s stability policy.

Additionally for PRs, a PR comment will be posted embedding a summary previewing any changes in both styles and links to further information. The next time the workflow is triggered on the same PR, it’ll update the pre-existing diff-shades comment.

Note

Jobs will only fail intentionally if a file failed to format while analyzing, or if changes were made to the stable style. Otherwise a failure indicates a bug in the workflow.

The workflow uploads several artifacts upon completion:

- HTML diffs (.html)

  - handy for pushes where there’s no PR to post a comment

- The raw analyses (.json)

  - in case you want to do further analysis using the collected data locally

- `.preview.pr-comment.md` and `.stable.pr-comment.md` (if triggered by a PR)

  - used to generate the PR comment and shouldn’t be downloaded