Hi,

2014/1/5 Marc Delisle <marc@infomarc.info>
Hi,
I'm aware that I'm opening a can of worms, but can we discuss PHPMD rules?

In particular, I find that to obey the maximum variable name (20
characters) rule, one has to sometimes abbreviate at the expanse of clarity.

http://ci.phpmyadmin.net/job/phpMyAdmin/908/pmdResult/type.811406648/

I agree. Many rules are useful to keep the code clear, but sometimes it could be a constraint.
Marc is talking about the length of variable names, but it's the same thing about the line length. Limit to 80 characters is out-of-dated. Our screen are larger than "before" so let's use more. (And you choose to use more because our standard is now 85 characters. In my job, we decided to use 120.)
But this was only an example to support what Marc said.

But if I'm right, the problem of PMD is that you can activate a group of rules but not a single rule. (Some one to contradict this please ?)

One possibility could be to try to implement the interesting rules in PHPCS if they don't exist.

Hugues.