Hello everybody, Since I noticed that many of the developers' comments on PRs are targeted to fix code formatting and style, I thought it would be very useful to have a way to reduce the time spent on these small issues (and therefore, gain more time to focus on the "working" code).
There is a tool called `clang-format` that can be used to format a piece of code to follow predefined style guidelines. There is also a python script called `git-clang-format` that can be used to check if commits respect these guidelines and to produce diffs (with newly formatted code) that can be later applied with the `git apply` command. It is also possible to configure Travis to make a build fail if the code is not consistent with the coding conventions. For example, ROOT <https://github.com/root-project/root> is a big project that uses this approach to validate its PRs. We could make our personalized clang-format configuration (that is almost trivial) and simply write a custom script which will be executed by Travis before the build process to make sure that all the code submitted is well written. I think this could be a great addition to the project since it will produce a more readable and consistent Shogun codebase over time. Here some further references: - https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html - https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormatStyleOptions.html - https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/master/ tools/clang-format/git-clang-format <https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/master/tools/clang-format/git-clang-format> What do you think? Could it be worth the effort? Cheers, Giovanni De Toni
