Re: Lessons from commit fest

tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us (Tom Lane) writes:
> Chris Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> writes:
>> Would it be a terrible idea to...
>>
>> - Draw the indent code from NetBSD into src/tools/pgindent
>
> I am not real eager to become maintainers of our own indent fork, which
> is what you propose. (Just for starters, what will we have to do to
> make it run on non-BSD systems?)
>
>> We are presently at the extreme position where pgindent is run once in
>> a very long time (~ once a year), at pretty considerable cost, and
>> with the associated cost that a whole lot of indentation problems are
>> managed by hand.
>
> Yeah. One reason for that is that the typedef problem makes it a pretty
> manual process.

As I hear more about the "typedef problem," a part of me gets more and
more appalled... It seems like we're creating some problem for
ourselves in that the typedefs don't seem to be able to be consistent.

I don't have an answer, but it's looking like a sore tooth that
clearly needs attention.

> 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 reformattings done by pgindent
> to code that hadn't changed at all, but it had formatted differently
> the prior year.
>
> For the same reason, my take on your "random whitespace changes are
> acceptable" theory is not no but hell no. It's gonna cost us,
> permanently, in manual patch adjustments if we allow the repository to
> get cluttered with content-free diffs.

I don't want to be cavalier about it; I'm hoping that in the
discussion, some more stable answer may fall out. Though with the
typedef issues that have emerged, I'm not entirely sanguine...
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