From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
cc: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>,
        Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>,
        Jelte Fennema <postgres@jeltef.nl>,
        Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>,
        "shiy.fnst@fujitsu.com" <shiy.fnst@fujitsu.com>,
        Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>,
        Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>,
        Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>,
        Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>,
        Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>, Jesse Zhang <sbjesse@gmail.com>,
        "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>,
        Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>
Subject: Re: run pgindent on a regular basis / scripted manner
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Comments: In-reply-to Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
	message dated "Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:03:54 -0400"
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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:23:22 -0400
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Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 8:45 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> +1. I think this is more annoying than the status quo ante.

> Although ... I do think it's spared me some rebasing pain, and that
> does have some real value. I wonder if we could think of other
> alternatives.

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.

> For example, maybe we could have a bot. If you push a
> commit that's not indented properly, the bot reindents the tree,
> updates git-blame-ignore-revs, and sends you an email admonishing you
> for your error.

I'm absolutely not in favor of completely-automated reindents.
pgindent is a pretty stupid tool and it will sometimes do stupid
things, which you have to correct for by tweaking the input
formatting.  The combination of the tool and human supervision
generally produces pretty good results, but the tool alone
not so much.

> Or we could have a server-side hook that will refuse
> the misindented commit, with some kind of override for emergency
> situations.

Even though I'm in the camp that would like the tree correctly
indented at all times, I remain very much against a commit hook.
I think that'd be significantly more annoying than the current
situation, which you're already unhappy about the annoying-ness of.

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.

			regards, tom lane