Re: run pgindent on a regular basis / scripted manner

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 12:59 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Hmm, that could be a deal-breaker. It's not going to be acceptable
> to have to pgindent different parts of the system on different platforms
> ... at least not unless we can segregate them on the file level, and
> even that would have a large PITA factor.

It's probably something that could be worked around. My remarks are
based on some dim memories of dealing with the tool before I arrived
at a configuration that works well enough for me. Importantly,
clang-format doesn't require you to futz around with Makefiles or
objdump or anything like that -- that's a huge plus. It doesn't seem
to impose any requirements on how I build Postgres at all (I generally
use gcc, not clang).

Even if these kinds of issues proved to be a problem for the person
tasked with running clang-format against the whole tree periodically,
they still likely wouldn't affect most of us. It's quite convenient to
use clang-format from an editor -- it can be invoked very
incrementally, against a small range of lines at a time. It's pretty
much something that I can treat like the built-in indent for my
editor. It's vastly different to the typical pgindent workflow.

> Still, we won't know unless someone makes a serious experiment with it.

There is one thing about clang-format that I find mildly infuriating:
it can indent function declarations in the way that I want it to, and
it can indent variable declarations in the way that I want it to. It
just can't do both at the same time, because they're both controlled
by AlignConsecutiveDeclarations.

Of course the way that I want to do things is (almost by definition)
the pgindent way, at least right now -- it's not necessarily about my
fixed preferences (though it can be hard to tell!). It's really not
surprising that clang-format cannot quite perfectly simulate pgindent.
How flexible can we be about stuff like that? Obviously there is no
clear answer right now.

--
Peter Geoghegan