Context

While working on CI hardening (feat/ci-hardening), we attempted to enable ruff check --select ALL across the Python codebase. All three Python files surfaced violations that could not be addressed through incremental patching — the code structure itself makes clean compliance impractical.

• Broad except Exception clauses throughout (BLE001)
• Missing type annotations on most functions and methods (ANN001/ANN202/ANN204)
• Missing or malformed docstrings across all classes and methods (D101/D102/D107)
• print() calls instead of structured logging (T201)
• os.path instead of pathlib (PTH109/PTH112/PTH118)
• Mutable class-level attributes without ClassVar annotation (RUF012)
• Complexity violations in _populate_commands and _spawn_subprocess (C901/PLR0912/PLR0915)
• try/except/pass patterns that silently swallow errors (SIM105/S110)
• Inline try/except on single lines (E701)
• Private member access across class boundaries — self.app._log_line (SLF001)

Proposal

All three files would benefit from a clean rewrite following current Python best practices:

• from __future__ import annotations + full type annotations
• logging module replacing all print() calls
• pathlib.Path throughout
• Specific exception types everywhere
• contextlib.suppress() where appropriate
• Docstrings on all public classes and methods
• ClassVar annotations on class-level mutables
• Helper methods to keep function complexity below threshold

This would also make the CI gate (ruff check --select ALL) unconditionally green, which is the goal of feat/ci-hardening.

Files concerned

• range42-context-tui.py
• range42-init.py
• wizard/preflight.py