Re: run pgindent on a regular basis / scripted manner

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 9:30 AM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> I don't see uncrustify or clang-format supporting typedef lists so maybe
> they implemented this feedback loop. It would be good to see if we can
> get either of these tools to match our formatting.

I personally use clang-format for Postgres development work, since it
integrates nicely with my text editor, and can be configured to
produce approximately the same result as pgindent (certainly good
enough when working on a patch that's still far from a committable
state). I'm fairly sure that clang-format has access to a full AST
from the clang compiler, which is the ideal approach - at least in
theory.

In practice this approach tends to run into problems when the relevant
AST isn't available. For example, if there's code that only builds on
Windows, maybe it won't work at all (at least on my Linux system).
This doesn't really bother me currently, since I only rely on
clang-format as a first pass sort of thing. Maybe I could figure out a
better way to deal with such issues, but right now I don't have much
incentive to.

Another advantage of clang-format is that it's a known quantity. For
example there is direct support for it built into meson, with bells
and whistles such as CI support:

https://mesonbuild.com/Code-formatting.html

My guess is that moving to clang-format would require giving up some
flexibility, but getting much better integration with text editors and
tools like meson in return. It would probably make it practical to
have much stronger rules about how committed code must be indented --
rules that are practical, and can actually be enforced. That trade-off
seems likely to be worth it in my view, though it's not something that
I feel too strongly about.

--
Peter Geoghegan