Deprecated Rules should be included and be available to call manually

[kilasuit]

From what I can currently see the Deprecated Rules aren't being added to the released version of PSScriptAnalyzer.

As the number of rules grows and more rules get deprecated there may well be a requirement from those in the community to be able to make use of a deprecated rule in a non-standard & possibly quite an obscure manner.

I think that it would be useful for the deprecated rules to be shipped alongside the built in rules and then extend the Get-ScriptAnalyzerRule & Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer cmdlets like below

Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -DeprecatedRule AvoidUninitializedVariable

The above would enforce the user to explicitly request to have the rule run. Whether this runs alongside all the built in rules or just runs this one rule would be a decision point that would need to be made

Get-ScriptAnalyzerRule -DeprecatedRules

I would expect that the above would just return the deprecated rules

Is this something that would be useful to others as well?

[pauby]

I was looking for the AvoidUninitialzedVariables rule yesterday and noticed it had been deprecated. If a rule is being deprecated, as in this case, because it's redundant (ie. replaced by another rule) then we should be able to decide whether to use it or not.

I think the -DeprecatedRules switch is a great way around this. Or Alternatively just rename the rule from:

PSAvoidUnintializedVariables

to

PSDeprecated_AvoidUninitializedVariables

[kapilmb]

Yes, I agree that if a rule is deprecated, instead of removing it completely from the built-in rules, we should provide users the option of using them, though by default they will be turned off.

[kilasuit]

Has this functionality now changed @bergmeister ??

[bergmeister]

@kilasuit The only deprecated rules that I can still see in the current version are here and are not compiled into PSSA. When I was looking at the history of some rules/issues previously I saw that the previous maintainers removed the source code for most of it, so we would need to dig in the git history to find the other deprecated rules. This happened before I joined and there was not rule deprecation after I've joined. Given the current state of history, I'd rather suggest to use an old version of PSSA if there is a legacy requirement since PSSA is side-by-side. Is there a specific rule that you'd like to have back? At first glance. it seems that the AvoidUninitializedVariables rule has been superseded by UseDeclaredVarsMoreThanAssignments

[roelrens]

AvoidUninitializedVariables isnot SuperSeded by UseDeclaredVarsMoreThanAssignment.
It is a total other issue.

The Reasoning to disable AvoidUninitializedVariables by default is valid, however removing the AvoidUninitializedVariables
is not.

here is the code
https://github.com/PowerShell/PSScriptAnalyzer/blob/2528ca68b121ed22f807165be19787b1db34b95f/Rules/AvoidUninitializedVariable.cs

[rjmholt]

The code for this rule has been absent from the PSSA codebase for some time now, suggesting that it was removed rather than just deprecated. Since the code is no longer in the codebase, there's no possibility of providing an option to run it, so I'll close this issue.

If you feel that the particular rule should be part of PSSA, please open a new issue to track that where we can discuss that rule and what might need to be improved in it for it to be in PSSA (I don't know the history but assume it was removed for a reason. EDIT: It looks like the rule was removed here).

[kilasuit]

@rjmholt at the time of raising this issue that particular rule was part of the code base & IMO shouldn't have been removed with an active issue referencing it.

Though the general ask was not just for that rule to be shipped but also a mechanism to allow for rule deprecation & running of deprecated rules - which could be still implemented by adding an additional ruleset, which would fix this particular issue.

I however will raise an issue to request we get the AvoidUninitializedVariables rule reinstated as a deprecated rule