Startup and the Linter Class

The two main classes in pylint.lint are .pylint.lint.Run and .pylint.lint.PyLinter.

The .pylint.lint.Run object is responsible for starting up pylint. It does some basic checking of the given command line options to find the initial hook to run, find the config file to use, and find which plugins have been specified. It can then create the main .pylint.lint.PyLinter instance and initialise it with the config file and plugins that were discovered when preprocessing the command line options. Finally the .pylint.lint.Run object launches any child linters for parallel jobs, and starts the linting process.

The .pylint.lint.PyLinter is responsible for coordinating the linting process. It parses the configuration and provides it for the checkers and other plugins, it handles the messages emitted by the checkers, it handles the output reporting, and it launches the checkers.