[pmd-rulesets] Rulesets should be in alphabetical order

[UncleOwen]

I was thinking of adding a rule that checks if rulesets are in alphabetical order. Mostly as a dogfood rule, but maybe someone wants to apply that to their own rulesets.

Would that be a use case for a new dialect? ruleset as a dialect of xml? Or would that run into the one-language-per-extension problem?

[UncleOwen]

I see there is already a dialect for maven poms:

    public PomDialectModule() {
        super(LanguageMetadata.withId(ID).name("Maven POM")
                              .extensions("pom")
                              .addDefaultVersion("4.0.0")
                              .asDialectOf("xml"));
    }

How does that work, if the file is usually called pom.xml?

[jsotuyod]

It doesn't really work, you need to force the language (--force-language <lang>).

As long as we don't fix the 1:1 mapping between extensions and languages we will have this issue.

[UncleOwen]

Ok, in that case I'll shelve my idea until that is fixed.

[zbynek]

Maybe this can be achieved using the existing XPath rule for XML with something like

//rule[fn:compare(@name,following-sibling::rule[1]/@name)=1]