Why are documents that confusing and options setting that hard to set?

I was trying to set the max chars per line but the document is very confusing and did not clearly tell me what to set in .eslintrc.json

I eventually found the way to set it outside of the official doc but the way to set it is very strange.

"max-len": [
            2, 180, 4
        ]

I can’t find the document about what is 2 and what is 4. What is going on?

[platinumazure]

I think there are two different issues here.

1. Rule documentation assumes that users are familiar with how to set severity of rules and do not mention that severity is the first argument for rule configuration (because that’s covered in the Configuration page).
2. Some rules’ options might not be clear. We’ve tried to avert this in more recent rules by always using an object option, so that object keys can help explain what the option is. Some of our older rules use an array of options instead, so users have to understand the positional aspect of the options, which isn’t useful.

The first issue could be fixed by updating site generation to add a quick paragraph about rule severity into each rule (just a very quick reference about off/warn/error and 0/1/2 but then link to the relevant section in Configuring docs).

The second issue, in the particular case of max-len, could be fixed by expanding the schema to support an object option. At the very least, I think the tab width option should be in an object (I think the line length wouldn’t have to be in the object since that should be a fairly obvious configuration setting). We could also potentially deprecate the positional option style and recommend the new approach in docs.

[not-an-aardvark]

Closing because this is working as intended.