Re: [HACKERS] Preliminary results for proposed new pgindent implementation

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> * Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
>> Yes, moving the goalposts on ease-of-use is an important consideration
>> here.  What that says to me is that we ought to pull FreeBSD indent
>> into our tree, and provide Makefile support that makes it easy for
>> any developer to build it and put it into their PATH.  (I suppose
>> that means support in the MSVC scripts too, but somebody else will
>> have to do that part.)

> I'm not a huge fan of this, however.  Do we really need to carry around
> the FreeBSD indent in our tree?  I had been expecting that these changes
> would eventually result in a package that's available in the common
> distributions (possibly from apt/yum.postgresql.org, at least until it's
> in the main Debian-based and RHEL-based package systems).  Are you
> thinking that we'll always have to have our own modified version?

I certainly would rather that our version matched something that's under
active maintenance someplace.  But it seems like there are two good
arguments for having a copy in our tree:

* easy accessibility for PG developers

* at any given time we need to be using a specific "blessed" version,
so that all developers can get equivalent results.  There's pretty much
no chance of that happening if we depend on distro-provided packages,
even if those share a common upstream.

We've had reasonably decent luck with tracking the tzcode/tzdata packages
as local copies, so I feel like we're not taking on anything unreasonable
if our model is that we'll occasionally (not oftener than once per year)
update our copy to recent upstream and then re-indent using that.

> What about perltidy itself..?  We don't include that in our tree either.

Not being much of a Perl guy, I don't care one way or the other about
perltidy.  Somebody else can work on that if it needs work.
        regards, tom lane