On 12/29/2025 14:44, Ryan Schmitt wrote:
On Sun, Dec 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM Oleg Kalnichevski <[email protected]> wrote:
Code style is another potentially inflammatory subject. I would be
*strongly* against any post-commit automation that re-formats and
commits formatting changes to the repository.
You're preaching to the choir on this one. I would never, ever stand for
something like that. All I'm saying is that an automated Gradle task that
finds and fixes Checkstyle violations, according to our existing rules
(mandatory `final` for local variables and parameters, no unused imports,
etc) would be strictly superior to fixing those things manually. Such a
task would of course have to be invoked manually and would not be run as
part of the default build tasks.
I have my own opinions about the value of code formatting rules generally,
and which ones are worth enforcing, but that's not within the scope of the
thread.
Event now there is nothing stopping one from
1. creating a code style scheme for IntelliJ
2. extending project's code style to match the IntelliJ scheme [1]
3. re-formatting the entire code base *once* and committing a single commit
4. living happily ever after
Oleg
[1] https://github.com/apache/httpcomponents-stylecheck
I find that code reformatting has significant downsides. It makes `git
blame` output meaningless, it creates merge conflicts and makes it
difficult or impossible to cherry-pick changes across branches or manage
long-lived feature branches, it adds diff noise when comparing releases, it
invalidates custom patches maintained by certain companies or linux
distros, etc. A recurring annoyance for me when working on Rust codebases
is this constant, pointless code churn created by rustfmt, clippy, etc and
their ever-changing rules and recommendations. Stability is valuable, even
when it comes to the literal text of the source code.
I would actually quit as a release manager right on spot had the
automatic formatting been even seriously considered. I use commit
history as a source for release notes and generally to keep track of
what has been going with the project since the last release. Style
formatting commits / noisy commits / "I fucked up, let me try again"
commits / all those nasty dependabot minor version bumps make my life
miserable.
Having said all that I am certain if code style formatting support can
be done with Gradle it can be done with Maven or IntelliJ / Eclipse plugin.
Oleg
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