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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 22, 2025, 04:11 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqfrfs8lga.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <20250621050743.GA3007684@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> My ideal workflow would probably be taking a pass with:
>
>   git rebase -x 'git clang-format --style=file -p HEAD^ || git commit --no-edit --amend -a'
>
> is a better match.  That command is a bit of a mouthful, but we
> could perhaps roll it into a script or a Makefile target.

The "-p" option does sound like a good thing. Taking the tool's suggestion wholesale without human judgement would be better than taking what a human developer typed as-is only for somebody totally new to the language and to the project. For more experienced developers, I would trust human judgement a lot more than I trust the tool's suggestion, and "-p" may be a good escape hatch.

> The current "make
> style" only looks at uncommitted changes in the working tree (and of
> course isn't interactive).

Yes, that makes it much less useful than it could be.

> The big pain I see in this (or any other workflow) is getting bugged
> about suggestions you've rejected. In an ideal world we'd tune
> .clang-format so that all of its suggestions are good, but I don't think
> we're there yet. ;)

Me neither.