Re: Lessons from commit fest

Tom Lane wrote:
> The main problem I see with "pgindent early and often" is that it only
> works well if everyone is using exactly the same pgindent code (and
> exactly the same typedef list).  Otherwise you just get buried in
> useless whitespace diffs.
> 
> It's bad enough that Bruce whacks around his copy from time to time :-(.
> I would say that the single greatest annoyance for maintaining our back
> branches is that patches tend to not back-patch cleanly, and well over
> half the time it's because of random reformatting done by pgindent
> to code that hadn't changed at all, but it had formatted differently
> the prior year. 

I hate to say it but pgindent formatting changes are usually made in
cases where you or the community want pgindent to improve its indenting. :-)
So we improve pgindent but pay for it in backpatching difficulties.  :-(

> I guess an advantage of maintaining our own fork is that there'd be Only
> One True pgindent, thereby alleviating that problem; but I'm still not
> eager to go there.  If we were going to do it, I'd really wish that we
> could standardize on a version that didn't need a typedef list.  The

I don't think that is possible.  GNU indent 2.2.9 requires the same -T
option:
      You  must  use the -T option to tell indent the name of all the      type names in your program that are defined
bytypedef.  -T can be      specified more than once, and all names specified are used.  For      example, if your
programcontains
 
           typedef unsigned long CODE_ADDR;           typedef enum {red, blue, green} COLOR;
      you would use the options -T CODE_ADDR -T COLOR

astyle doesn't seem to require it but perhaps it just mishandles them. 
As I remember there isn't anything about the C grammar that can tell
identify a typedef when it needs to.

> But in any case, this is all focusing on trivialities.  The stuff
> pgindent can fix is, by definition, stuff that committers don't really
> have to worry about during patch review.  The stuff I'm worried about
> is at a higher level than that.

Agreed.  Reformatting is small compared to understanding the patch,
adjusting in the comments, testing, documentation, etc.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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