Noteref helps you make notes in your codebase and maintain references to them. This is particularly useful for documenting preconditions, postconditions, invariants, and other kinds of assumptions that aren't enforced by your tooling. For example, you might have a note like this:
```ruby
def wibble(x) ... end ```
Elsewhere, you might depend on that postcondition. You can make this clear by referencing the note:
```ruby list = wibble(wobble)
return list[0] # This is safe due to [ref:wibble_nonempty]. ```
Noteref ensures such references stay up-to-date. Concretely, Noteref scans a directory recursively and checks the following:
The syntax is [note:label] for notes and [ref:label] for references. Noteref works with any programming language, and it respects your .gitignore file as well as other common filter files.
The easiest way to use Noteref is to run the noteref command with no arguments. It will scan the working directory and check the two conditions described above.
``` USAGE: noteref [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]
FLAGS: -h, --help Prints help information -n, --list-notes List all the notes. -r, --list-refs List all the refs. -V, --version Prints version information
OPTIONS:
-p, --path
It is highly recommended to set up Noteref as an automated continuous integration check. Noteref is fast and probably won't be the bottleneck in your CI.
The idea for Noteref was inspired by the GHC notes convention. GHC is one of the most maintainable codebases for its size. This article has more insights into how the GHC developers manage that codebase.