Spotless — Diagnose and Check

[x80486]

When exploring the tasks for a Gradle project, the relevant tasks for Spotless are:

$ ./gradlew tasks
...

Verification tasks
------------------
check - Runs all checks.
spotlessApply - Applies code formatting steps to sourcecode in-place.
spotlessCheck - Checks that sourcecode satisfies formatting steps.
spotlessDiagnose
spotlessJava
spotlessJavaApply
spotlessJavaCheck
spotlessJavaDiagnose
spotlessKotlinGradle
spotlessKotlinGradleApply
spotlessKotlinGradleCheck
spotlessKotlinGradleDiagnose

...

spotlessApply is clear, and so is spotlessCheck; however, spotlessDiagnose lacks a description. Is spotlessDiagnose really necessary? Does spotlessCheck also run all the checks and verifications that spotlessDiagnose performs?

I'm trying to build a pipeline to check for formatting errors based on the Spotless configuration in question, but I'm unsure if spotlessDiagnose makes sense for a CI/CD workflow.

It looks like spotlessCheck is intended to verify the formatting, while spotlessDiagnose may provide some information/diagnostics/insights into formatting issues?

[nedtwigg]

Some formatter steps have idempotence problems. Spotless fixes them automatically. Sometimes they cannot be fixed, in which case Spotless yells and says "run spotlessDiagnose to see why this is failing"

https://github.com/diffplug/spotless/blob/main/PADDEDCELL.md