> As a concrete example, suppose Alice commits some code that uses "foo" > as a variable name, and more or less concurrently, Bob commits something > that defines "foo" as a typedef. Bob's change is likely to have > side-effects on the formatting of Alice's code. If they're working in > well-separated parts of the source tree, nobody is likely to notice > that for awhile --- but whoever next touches the files Alice touched > will be in for a surprise, which will be more or less painful depending > on whether we've installed brittle processes.
Sounds like this conflict could be handled fairly easily by having a local git hook rerunning pgindent whenever you rebase a commit: 1. if you changed typedefs.list the hook would format all files 2. if you didn't it only formats the files that you changed > As another example, the mechanisms we use to create the typedefs list > in the first place are pretty squishy/leaky: they depend on which > buildfarm animals are running the typedef-generation step, and on > whether anything's broken lately in that code --- which happens on > a fairly regular basis (eg [1]). Maybe that could be improved, > but I don't see an easy way to capture the set of system-defined > typedefs that are in use on platforms other than your own. I > definitely do not want to go over to hand maintenance of that list. Wouldn't the automatic addition-only solution that Andres suggested solve this issue? Build farms could still remove unused typedefs on a regular basis, but commits would at least add typedefs for the platform that the comitter uses. > I think we need to be content with a "soft", it's more-or-less-right > approach to indentation. I think that this would already be a significant improvement over the current situation. My experience with the current situation is that indentation is more-or-less-wrong. > As I explained to somebody upthread, the > main benefit of this for most people is avoiding the need for a massive > once-a-year reindent run that causes merge failures for many pending > patches. Merge failures are one issue. But personally the main benefit that I would be getting is being able to run pgindent on the files I'm editing and get this weird +12 columns formatting correct without having to manually type it. Without pgindent also changing random parts of the files that someone else touched a few commits before me.
