There's a code base (Py 2.6 stuff) that extensively uses zope components and there's a need for tool that can analyze the sources. The tool is supposed to analyze the source; like look for usage of some restricted classes/objects/interfaces, etc. Basically, scan each statement in the source while being aware of the statement's context (which class/method/function it is in, which module, etc) and analyze it for specific patterns.
The approach of reading the source into text buffers and matching patterns doesn't seem to be a reliable approach at all.
Another approach that came up was of using inspect, but inspect seems to be broken and doesn't seem to be able to handle our code base (multiple tries, all of them crashed inspect). I might have to give up on that as there seems to be now way out with inspect.
Now, other options that I could think of are using pylint or using AST (and doing a lot of postprocessing on it). Am not sure to what extent pylint is extensible; and when it comes to analyzing source statments if pylint could be aware of context (i.e, which class defn/function/method has this statement etc) Using AST seems too much of an overkill for such a trivial purpose.
What would you suggest as a suitable approach here? Anybody else had to deal with such an issue before?
Please suggest.