Re: run pgindent on a regular basis / scripted manner

Hi Andres,

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 3:34 PM Andres Freund wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> When developing patches I find it fairly painful that I cannot re-indent
> patches with pgindent without also seeing a lot of indentation changes
> in unmodified parts of files. It is easy enough ([1]) to only re-indent
> files that I have modified, but there's often a lot of independent
> indentation changes in the files that I did modified.
>
> I e.g. just re-indented patch 0001 of my GetSnapshotData() series and
> most of the hunks were entirely unrelated. Despite the development
> window for 14 having only relatively recently opened. Based on my
> experience it tends to get worse over time.

How bad was it right after branching 13? I wonder if we have any
empirical measure of badness over time -- assuming there was a point in
the recent past where everything was good, and the bad just crept in.

>
>
> Is there any reason we don't just automatically run pgindent regularly?
> Like once a week? And also update typedefs.list automatically, while
> we're at it?

You know what's better than weekly? Every check-in. I for one would love
it if we can just format the entire codebase, and ensure that new
check-ins are also formatted. We _do_ need some form of continuous
integration to catch us when we have fallen short (again, once HEAD
reaches a "known good" state, it's conceivably cheap to keep it in the
good state.

Cheers,
Jesse