Welcome to the 44th edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.
This edition covers what happened during the month of September 2018.
Brian Carlson sent a patch that adds a .editorconfig file to the
Git codebase.
The EditorConfig web site explains the purpose and format of such files. It also list a number of text editors that support such files either natively or after installing a plugin.
The goal of adding this file to the Git codebase is to make it easier to automatically configure one’s editor. This will help contributors, especially new ones, follow the many indentation rules used in the Git codebase without having to read the CodingGuidelines document.
Taylor Blau, who has been using Vim with the editorconfig-vim plugin
for years, supported the patch and the choice of settings that Brian
had written in the .editorconfig file. He suggested adding a
guideline to enforce at most 72 characters per line in commit
messages.
Junio Hamano, the Git maintainer, also replied to Brian wondering how
to keep the content of the file in sync with the .clang-format file
that is already part of the project and can be used through the
style Makefile target.
Brian replied to Junio that make style is not run automatically and
only formats C code, not Perl, Python, shell code and commit
messages. Brian also said that he had trouble running make style as
it invokes clang-format as a Git subcommand.
Junio replied that in an ideal dream-world, an EditorConfig driven tool solution to “generate clang-format configuration from the section for C language in any EditorConfig file” already existed, but otherwise he would be “perfectly OK if the plan is to manually keep them (loosely) in sync”.
Eric Sunshine then pointed Brian to git-clang-format
which integrates clang-format with Git, so that clang-format can be
run on the changes in current files or a specific commit.
This prompted Peff and Brian to discuss possible improvements in
Debian or Git that would make git-clang-format work better.
Responding to Junio, Brian suggested adding a script to check that
.editorconfig and .clang-format were kept in sync, but Junio
replied that adding a comment in both files saying that they should be
kept in sync would be enough.
Brian resent an improved version of his patch which enforces at most 72 characters per line in commit messages along with another patch that adds the comments that Junio suggested.
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason suggested an improvement to also catch Perl
files with the .pl and .pm file extensions. Brian
implemented this in a third version
of his patches.
This third version should be merged into the “master” branch soon.
Various
Light reading
Git tools and sites
This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>, Markus Jansen <mja@jansen-preisler.de> and Gabriel Alcaras <gabriel.alcaras@telecom-paristech.fr>.