As noted in #11613 (comment), I'd prefer if we leave these and # noqa any new References sections. And ideally, sphinx-gallery would do it all for us.

Note sphinx-gallery/sphinx-gallery#205
sphinx-gallery/sphinx-gallery#347

Looks like sphinx gallery will merge the ability to add :meth:our-buried-method to the backreferences!

Just a more general view here: I think examples are meant to teach how to acomplish something with the library at hand. They do not need to be PEP8 compatible. Of course one should not teach bad style, but the reason for E402 does not really apply to any examples anyways. For the sake of understandability, it might make perfect sense to import certrain things late in an example or a tutorial, close to the place where it is actually needed, such that the reader does not need to scroll all the way up to a place where all imports live.

Is there a way to over-lapping constraints like that?

I like @ImportanceOfBeingErnest 's suggestion that we only skip this test on the examples.

Thats how it was before #11613, but @QuLogic doesn't like the globs....

BTW< I don't care about this PR at all - please set up flake8 the way you'd like it. I just use it from the command line so however experts want it set up is fine w/ me...