Hi Toon, On Tue, 1 Jul 2025, Toon Claes wrote: > Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > "brian m. carlson" <sandals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > >> I still think that if we're going to have this functionality and > >> expect it to be used, we need to make it the default, build > >> appropriate tooling, and check it in CI. If it's not > >> fire-and-forget, people won't use it. > > > > There probably needs some balancing act, as I already pointed out, > > what clang-format gives often do not make sense, and the point is that > > they are not about styles (where we can safely say "no style is liked > > by everybody") but about how readable the result is (which sometimes > > is subjective but more often it is not). Until the tool and its > > configuration is polished enough, blindly applying the result with > > fire-and-forget mentality will degrade the quality of our codebase. > > Allow me to share an unpopular opinion. I think you either fully commit > to a formatter, or you don't care about formatting at all. I realize > that's probably overly strict for most people, but I've been working > mostly in Golang for several years, and having a tool that formats code > and it's output is unarguably the standard is a bliss. > > I think the only way we can stop bikeshedding about formatting, is by > adopting clang-format and make it's output the golden standard. We might > not like it's output (similar to many people do not like `gofmt`s > output), but it's a standard. If we have to wait for clang-format to > support all the configuration options we prefer, we will be having this > conversation over and over again over time. I don't think that's worth > it. > > Code formatting should be the job of an automated tool, not a person. > It's annoying to have this back-and-forth in reviews because it's not > following the standard _the Git project_ has set, while it would be a > lot less friction to follow a standard that's set by _the formatting > tool_. For the record, I share this opinion, and I don't even think that it is unpopular. There is a reason why there's ESLint, gofmt, rustfmt, RuboCop, etc. Even cURL comes with a helpful `make checksrc` with little room for distracting nitpicks about code style, making more room for a focus on correct code. Ciao, Johannes
