Unused wild card imports are not removed

[scottresnik]

Wild card imports seem to be ignored if they are unused. Is it possible to correct this? At the very least would it be possible to add a setting to fail if wild card imports are encountered?

• Gradle 4.7
• Spotless 3.10.0
• Windows 10 Pro

[scottresnik]

Example on github.

[nedtwigg]

Consider this situation:

import pkgA.*;
import pkgB.*;

public class Clazz {
    WhatPackageDidIComeFrom field;
}

Without slurping in the classpath, and then looking at the classfiles in those jars, we cannot know which package it came from. Basically requires a full compile. With #239 it might be vaguely possible to do, but it will certainly be a lot of work.

[scottresnik]

I kind of figured that would be the case.

What do you think about a setting to fail on cases of wild card imports?

[nedtwigg]

You can use a custom rule, something like:

custom 'noWildcardImports', {
  if (it.contains('*;\n')) {
    throw new Error('No wildcard imports allowed')
  }
}
bumpThisNumberIfACustomStepChanges(1)

[scottresnik]

Thanks @nedtwigg . While that would work, I think the a cleaner solution would be to use one of the static code analysis tools out there.

[nedtwigg]

Sounds good. Spotless is optimized for code formatting of the form String -> String. If you want to disallow wildcards, you can fudge it with Spotless, or use another tool. I don't think it makes sense to integrate static code analysis with Spotless unless it produces the String -> String output required for spotlessApply to work.