I've been working on a general repository linter. The idea is to declaratively define a set of rules/conventions for your repo, (for things that language-specific linters don't cover), covering things from directory structure, required files, file staleness/freshness, file size, rules for binary files, rules around use of invisible Unicode, etc. - which can be checked deterministically. Many/most large repos have a set of hand-authored scripts for doing these kinds of checks, the tool I'm building basically packages these in a fast, reusable and extensible tool, with some niceties added.
I like this idea. I feel the hurdle is that many people have come to rely on their language tools for install.
Yeah that's a good point, thank you. I should think about how to distribute/make it available via language-specific packages/tools.