@SuppressViolation(SomeRule)

[Bananeweizen]

If you use ArchUnit just for writing unit tests in your project, you will always fix the issues found by tests or edit the rules to eventually exclude a class from the set of imported classes. However, I'm using ArchUnit via the maven plugin with a selfmade rule library in many projects. In that scenario you will often face exceptional cases (e.g. a generated class using System.out, violating your ArchRule for that). It's then not possible to exclude this violating class in the rule library. This makes using a centrally maintained ruleset basically impossible for more than a single code base.

Therefore ArchUnit needs something like @SuppressWarning, @SuppressFBWarnings, etc. which can be applied to the source class instead of editing the ArchRule. This is very similar to using Spotbugs, Checkstyle etc. with a centrally defined ruleset, but allowing exceptions using annotations or comments on the violating class/method/field.

[hankem]

Not entirely what you're asking for, but maybe a workaround: If you freeze your ArchRule then each specific project can control the exceptions.

[codecholeric]

Just one thing to add, it should also be possible to put adjusted archunit_ignore_patterns.txt in each project to ignore the violations on a per project basis: https://www.archunit.org/userguide/html/000_Index.html#_ignoring_violations We can think about the annotation way, the only thing I don't like so much about this is, that it is the first thing that would demand a compile time dependency of production code to ArchUnit. Unfortunately @SuppressWarnings can definitely not be (ab-)used, since @Retention(SOURCE) :thinking: