Re: Proposal: format GDB Python files with black

[Andrew Burgess <andrew.burgess@embecosm.com>]

* Simon Marchi via Gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org> [2021-04-26 11:55:21 -0400]:

> Hi all,
> 
> A few people I talked to about this and I have good experience with the
> tool black to auto-format Python code.  It is simple to use, fast and
> reliable (if it detects that it changed the meaning of the program by
> mistake, internal-errors out).  I don't think I need to spell out the
> advantage of using such a tool, but just in case: it removes all the
> overhead of thinking about formatting when writing or reviewing code.
> 
> My suggestion would be to format our code with black all at once.  The
> typical counter-argument to this is "it will be harder to use
> git-blame".  I don't think this is true, because you need to be able to
> skip over commits anyway, and it's trivial to skip over a commit when
> git-blaming using an interactive tool.  But it's also possible to tell
> git to ignore certain commits when git-blaming [2], so we can do that.
> 
> I think the output of black is quite readable.  When it does weird
> stuff, it's generally because the lines / expressions are two long
> anyway, and deserve to be split in multiple lines / expressions.  Here's
> a branch that shows how it would look like:

In general, the idea of auto-formatting the code sounds great, but I
would like to understand more about how the process would work.

Right now, if I make a change I edit a file, git add, git commit, and
finally, git push.  At what point does the auto-formatting take place?
Do I need to manually run the tool after editing the file?  Is it
done, well, automatically at some point?  And if it is done
automatically, then at what point in the process does this happen, and
how does this relate to code review?

Thanks,
Andrew