Re: branching for 9.2devel

Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> If the tools become easy to run is it possible we cold get to the
> point where we do an indent run on every commit? This wold require a
> stable list of system symbols plus the tool would need to add any new
> symbols added by the patch. As long as the tool produced consistent
> output I don't see that it would produce the spurious merge conflicts
> we've been afraid of in the past. Those would only occur if a patch
> went in without pgindent being run, someone developed a patch against
> that tree, then pgindent was run before merging that patch. As long as
> it's run on every patch on commit it shouldn't cause those problems
> since nobody could use a non-pgindented code as their base.

No, not at all, because you're ignoring the common case of a series of
dependent patches that are submitted in advance of the first one having
been committed.

To get to the point where we could do things that way, it would have
to be the case that every developer could run pgindent locally and get
the same results that the committer would get. Maybe we'll get there
someday, and we should certainly try. But we're not nearly close enough
to be considering changing policy on that basis.

> Personally I've never really liked the pgindent run.

If everybody followed roughly the same coding/layout standards without
prompting, we'd not need it. But they don't so we do. I think pgindent
gets a not-trivial share of the credit for the frequently-mentioned fact
that the PG sources are pretty readable.

regards, tom lane