From: Toon Claes <toon@iotcl•com>
To: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox•com>,
"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste•net>
Cc: "Collin Funk" <collin.funk1@gmail•com>,
git@vger•kernel.org, "Karthik Nayak" <karthik.188@gmail•com>,
"Patrick Steinhardt" <ps@pks•im>, "René Scharfe" <l.s.r@web•de>
Subject: Re: .clang-format: how useful, how often used, and how well maintained?
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:08:52 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <875xgcq9zf.fsf@iotcl.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbjqi5tk3.fsf@gitster.g>
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox•com> writes:
> "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste•net> writes:
>
>> Yeah, then in that case, we probably want to ship some sort of container
>> and script that can do that. Our default Rust target is Debian stable,
>> so that seems like a decent target if we need to pick a distro. It's
>> also a very common distro used in containers, so it's widely available
>> to contributors using container-based development environments.
That sounds like the ideal solution.
>> I still think that if we're going to have this functionality and expect
>> it to be used, we need to make it the default, build appropriate
>> tooling, and check it in CI. If it's not fire-and-forget, people won't
>> use it.
>
> There probably needs some balancing act, as I already pointed out,
> what clang-format gives often do not make sense, and the point is
> that they are not about styles (where we can safely say "no style is
> liked by everybody") but about how readable the result is (which
> sometimes is subjective but more often it is not). Until the tool
> and its configuration is polished enough, blindly applying the
> result with fire-and-forget mentality will degrade the quality of
> our codebase.
Allow me to share an unpopular opinion. I think you either fully commit
to a formatter, or you don't care about formatting at all. I realize
that's probably overly strict for most people, but I've been working
mostly in Golang for several years, and having a tool that formats code
and it's output is unarguably the standard is a bliss.
I think the only way we can stop bikeshedding about formatting, is by
adopting clang-format and make it's output the golden standard. We might
not like it's output (similar to many people do not like `gofmt`s
output), but it's a standard. If we have to wait for clang-format to
support all the configuration options we prefer, we will be having this
conversation over and over again over time. I don't think that's worth
it.
Code formatting should be the job of an automated tool, not a person.
It's annoying to have this back-and-forth in reviews because it's not
following the standard _the Git project_ has set, while it would be a
lot less friction to follow a standard that's set by _the formatting
tool_.
--
Cheers,
Toon
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2025-07-01 14:09 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-06-19 16:38 .clang-format: how useful, how often used, and how well maintained? Junio C Hamano
2025-06-19 20:30 ` Christian Couder
2025-06-20 0:20 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-06-20 14:08 ` Christian Couder
2025-06-20 16:36 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-06-21 5:07 ` Jeff King
2025-06-22 4:11 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-06-19 21:17 ` brian m. carlson
2025-06-19 21:31 ` Collin Funk
2025-06-19 22:56 ` brian m. carlson
2025-06-20 15:19 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-07-01 14:08 ` Toon Claes [this message]
2025-07-01 16:59 ` Johannes Schindelin
2025-07-01 20:42 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-07-01 21:12 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-06-23 8:46 ` Karthik Nayak
2025-06-23 16:26 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-06-24 23:27 ` Karthik Nayak
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