Re: Using clang-format

[Simon Marchi via Gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org>]

> As an occasional contributor I’d love this.
> Getting the correct style right is complicated if you spend most of your
> time developing other projects with other coding styles.
> It’s even worse for cases that are not trivial as GDB’s codebase is
> occasionally inconsistent so there’s nowhere where to take inspiration
> from.

Thanks for that feedback.

> 
>>> I noticed this:
>>>
>>>  btrace_block (CORE_ADDR begin, CORE_ADDR end) : begin (begin), end (end)
>>>  {
>>>    /* Nothing.  */
>>>  }
>>>
>>> The initializer list is put on the same line as the constructor's
>>> prototype.  If there's a way to tell it that we don't want that, it
>>> would be closer to our style.
> 
> You can use BreakConstructorInitializers.

Tom's config has

  BreakConstructorInitializers: BeforeColon

But it still does it.

> Personally, I’d be a bit worried about dealing with difficult conflicts
> manually, but there are solutions for that:
> 
> 1. Rebase your branch to the point just before reformatting:
>      $ git rebase <commit before clang-format commit ID>
> 
> 2. Rebase on top of the format changes but preferring your local
>    changes:
> 
>      $ git rebase --strategy=recursive \
>            --strategy-option=theirs <clang-format commit ID>
> 
> 3. Finally reformat all of your code you just committed and amend
>    your previous commits.

I think that's a good option.  It's a bit of manual steps, but:

1. It's O(1), it's as quick to do this with a small patch and a big
   patch.
2. It's temporary, eventually all patches that were in the pipeline at
   the time of the re-format will be submitted or dropped.

> 
> 
> At work we decided not to reformat the whole C/C++ code base (while
> we did for Python).  Instead, we use some git hooks I wrote which
> reformat only what you are committing.  See
> https://github.com/barisione/clang-format-hooks.
> 
> While I wrote these scripts and would be happy for others to use
> them, I think that (in GDB’s case) it would be easier to just
> reformat everything and deal with the short-term pain. 

Agreed.

Simon