Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2025 10:23:14 -0600
From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: =?utf-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro?= Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>,
	Aleksander Alekseev <aleksander@tigerdata.com>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>,
	Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>,
	Arseniy Mukhin <arseniy.mukhin.dev@gmail.com>,
	Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>,
	Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] pg_bsd_indent: improve formatting of multiline comments
Message-ID: <aTxBcklpZcHAUAi1@nathan>
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On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 11:17:01AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> =?utf-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro?= Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de> writes:
>> It's strange to see this thread go on about messing with the Perl script
>> because we're too afraid of pg_bsd_indent.  Maybe we should take
>> ownership of that code -- improve its own indentation to our
>> conventions, add comments, rename unclear variables, and so on until we
>> have something we can work with, and fix these weird bugs and
>> idiosincratic behaviors we don't like.  I just found out this code dates
>> back from 1976.
> 
> I've worked with that code a little bit, and it's mostly unreadable
> spaghetti :-(.  If somebody wants to make an effort to make it not
> so awful, that'd be great, but I fear it's a very nontrivial project.

Yeah, I tried to find a bug in it recently and could do little more than
trial-and-error in the areas that seemed vaguely close (with no success).
I'm generally critical of efforts to rewrite things from scratch, but this
might be a case where it's the better option.

-- 
nathan