Re: run pgindent on a regular basis / scripted manner

On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 10:23 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> An alternative I was thinking about after reading your earlier email
> was going back to the status quo ante, but doing the manual tree-wide
> reindents significantly more often than once a year. Adding one at
> the conclusion of each commitfest would be a natural thing to do,
> for instance. It's hard to say what frequency would lead to the
> least rebasing pain, but we know once-a-year isn't ideal.

Yes. I suspect once a commitfest still wouldn't be often enough. Maybe
once a month or something would be. But I'm not sure. You might rebase
once over the misindented commit and then have to rebase again over
the indent that fixed it. There's not really anything that quite
substitutes for doing it right on every commit.

> The bottom line here, I think, is that there's a subset of committers
> that would like perfectly mechanically-indented code at all times,
> and there's another subset that just doesn't care that much.
> We don't (and shouldn't IMO) have a mechanism to let one set force
> their views on the other set. The current approach is clearly
> insufficient for that, and I don't think trying to institute stronger
> enforcement is going to make anybody happy.

I mean, I think we DO have such a mechanism. Everyone agrees that the
buildfarm has to stay green, and we have a buildfarm member that
checks pgindent, so that means everyone has to pgindent. We could
decide to kill that buildfarm member, in which case we go back to
people not having to pgindent, but right now they do.

And if it's going to remain the policy, it's better to enforce that
policy earlier rather than later. I mean, what is the point of having
a system where we let people do the wrong thing and then publicly
embarrass them afterwards? How is that better than preventing them
from doing the wrong thing in the first place? Even if they don't
subjectively feel embarrassed, nobody likes having to log back on in
the evening or the weekend and clean up after something they thought
they were done with.

In fact, that particular experience is one of the worst things about
being a committer. It actively discourages me, at least, from trying
to get other people's patches committed. This particular problem is
minor, but the overall experience of trying to get things committed is
that you have to check 300 things for every patch and if you get every
one of them right then nothing happens and if you get one of them
wrong then you get a bunch of irritated emails criticizing your
laziness, sloppiness, or whatever, and you have to drop everything to
go fix it immediately. What a deal! I'm sure this isn't the only
reason why we have such a huge backlog of patches needing committer
attention, but it sure doesn't help. And there is absolutely zero need
for this to be yet another thing that you can find out you did wrong
in the 1-24 hour period AFTER you type 'git push'.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com