Behaviour of lint check `files_unchanged` is different in 3.1.2

[awgymer]

Description of the bug

In previous versions of the tools manifest.author was required for the files_unchanged check and this was checked up front and if it wasn't present the test was skipped (source code).

In 3.1.2 we now pull names from either manifest.author or manifest.contributors (source code). However neither of these are checked for up front now (source code).

This can cause an unhandled error to be raised if neither manifest.author or manifest.contributors is present or if they resolve to an empty string (e.g. if contributors do not have a name field set see: pairgenomealign example).

We should either check for the presence of the author/contributors up front or add a check at the point of determination of names to similarly ignore the lint test.

Command used and terminal output

System information

No response

[srikarjy]

Hi @awgymer @mirpedrol — I'd like to work on this if it's still open. Based on your diagnosis: I'll add an up-front check for missing/empty manifest.author/manifest.contributors names before the files_unchanged test runs, so it skips gracefully the same way it did pre-3.1.2, rather than raising an unhandled error. Will add a test case reproducing the pairgenomealign-style scenario (contributors present but no name field) to confirm the fix. Let me know if you'd prefer the check placed at config-load time vs. at the point of name determination happy to go with whichever fits the codebase better.