[Development] clang-format

[Tor Arne Vestbø]

How about we also start with only one or two  obvious rules that everyone agrees on? I don’t want Qt development to turn into Python PEP8 type rigid rules that makes you jump through a million hoops. If the latter is the goal here then I’m against enforcing clang-format, and it should be implemented as a bot that just warns, similar to the current style bot.

- Tor Arne

> On 20 Jun 2018, at 11:21, André Pönitz <apoenitz at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 06:30:26AM +0000, Lars Knoll wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On 19 Jun 2018, at 18:19, Ville Voutilainen
>>> <ville.voutilainen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 19 June 2018 at 19:13, Philippe <philwave at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> For the above reasons I'd lean towards not running it globally and
>>>>> just using it on new changes.
>>>> 
>>>> +1, based on my clang-format experience on a big application.
>>>> 
>>>> BTW, keep in mind that you can disable clang-format on code
>>>> sections with:
>>>> 
>>>> // clang-format off // clang-format on
>>> 
>>> When I last experienced a large-scale clang-format reformat, it
>>> really hurt development during the churn. We should somehow manage
>>> to do it during a time when there aren't many pending patches in the
>>> pipeline. I'm not concerned about git-blame; that has never been a
>>> problem after reformats. However, I do not care about indentation
>>> nor do I want to spend time on it either way, it has no actual
>>> effect on readability and maintainability of code, and consistency
>>> outside the file you're in has never mattered to me one bit.
>>> 
>>> IOW, I'm not opposed to reformats and auto-checking of clang-format
>>> (or even hooking it), but I do not see it as a thing with all that
>>> great return-of-investment.
>> 
>> It helps in that you do not need to point those things out in code
>> reviews, and that I (and others) won’t even create changes with wrong
>> formatting that I’ll need to fix up later on. It’s part of a larger
>> story, where I would like to get as much automatic checking of changes
>> done before humans start reviewing.
> 
> It's also a cultural thing.
> 
> Quite a few people seem to take less offense from a "Your formatting is
> bad" when the comment comes from a bot than when it comes from a human. 
> 
>> One idea could be to introduce this incrementally. Let’s first start
>> off with enforcing it for new changes. Then we run it globally over
>> the code base shortly before Qt 6.0 is being released. At that time
>> merges shouldn’t be as much of a problem (as we’ll probably
>> cherry-pick into Qt 5.15) and by then all new changes in Gerrit will
>> be properly formatted (due to the earlier hook).
> 
> Incrementally sounds good to me.
> 
> Still I am a bit of a fence here. So far I've seen a couple of auto-
> formatting attempts biting back, so I thinl it would help to convince me
> to see the kind of changes that would happen first before deciding
> on the global change.
> 
> Andre'
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