Replace inspect module for parsing

[meshy]

We currently use the inspect module to extract Django code and structure.

This has several drawbacks:

• The version of Django that we're parsing needs to be installed in the project (at least locally).
• The inspect module executes code (on import) when parsing modules. This means:
  • We can only inspect code we trust.
  • Python code inspected can mutate itself on import (see Django 4.1 data #181 (comment) and View.view_is_async should not be a bool #184 )

We recently refactored the populate_cbv script to abstract the importer into a protocol that will (hopefully) make it easier for new importers to be written. LibCSV may be an appropriate alternative to inspect.

ccbv/cbv/importer/importers.py

Lines 29 to 31 in a89118b

	class CodeImporter(Protocol):
	def generate_code_data(self) -> Iterator[CodeElement]:
	...

[meshy]

Python's ast module has potential, if we can be sure it preserves formatting.

[meshy]

https://github.com/PyCQA/astroid is interesting.

[ghickman]

There's an interesting proposal to the Twisted project currently about a tool called passmanager, which could be useful to us.

It drives the pydoctor tool. I've pointed this at a local Django clone, and it pulled out many things we would want:

I'm not suggesting we use pydoctor, but it shows it's pulling out similar things we want.