@peterflynn it's understandable, so what do you think the strategy should be for linters to report their internal issues? just log it to console? see this issue for example: cfjedimaster/brackets-jshint#24 with this change, the way the output looks likes is the following:
![problem](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/3368515/1959732/304d996e-8236-11e3-8165-956f6c82d16e.png)
which is much nicer than seeing "nothing to lint".

Now, I understand your point of view. I do think, however, that having the checks for valid input in the code does not actually contradict to the requirement to the extension to report things better. For example, this message "bad option" could have been reported as meta instead of error (on the other hand, having only meta would not cause problem panel to pop up).

So with this background what your suggestion would be for a long-term proper solution? Note that I also filed #6460 to as an idea to address this.