[Users] Reformatting Carpet's source code

[Erik Schnetter]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Ian Hinder <ian.hinder at aei.mpg.de> wrote:

>
> On 3 Jul 2015, at 23:33, Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu> wrote:
>
> I've come to like to use a tool to automatically indent and format source
> code. This has several advantages -- the code has automatically a
> consistent style, indentation errors become obvious, and one doesn't have
> to spend time formatting the code manually while coding.
>
> clang-format is the best such tool of which I'm aware. It's vastly better
> than e.g. GNU indent.
>
> I propose to re-format Carpet's source code via clang-format.
>
> Usually, changing the source code format is disruptive, since patches or
> local modifications won't apply cleanly any more. However, with
> clang-format, I don't think that this is an issue -- one can use
> clang-format on the modified code (e.g. a branch), which should eliminate
> gratuitous changes.
>
>
> Please comment.
>
>
> Suppose that I have a local branch with a number of commits (I do).  If I
> want to cherry-pick something from the new reformatted master, I could add
> a new commit to my branch which reformats everything, and cherry-picking
> would hopefully then be possible.  To rebase my branch off of the
> reformatted master, I would probably have to rebase it off the commit in
> master before the reformat, then apply the reformatting myself, then rebase
> again of the new master.  So apart from the amount of git-gymnastics needed
> to do this, it seems OK.  More serious would be the utter impossibility of
> diffing formaline tarballs across the change and identifying the real
> differences.
>
> I hope it doesn't need to be said, but any commits which introduce
> reformatting should be clearly labeled as such, and should not introduce
> any other changes, as these will be lost during a rebase in which
> formatting commits are skipped and formatting run again.
>
> With the above considerations, is it worth doing this?
>

Yes, it definitively is. Not having to worry about indentation and
formatting while coding frees the mind; it is a transformative experience.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu>
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/eschnetter/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.einsteintoolkit.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20150704/84a9dbe4/attachment.html