Re: .clang-format: how useful, how often used, and how well maintained?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 20, 2025, 15:19 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbjqi5tk3.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <aFSVhpnNnj6p3r7n@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> 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.