Re: Xen Coding style and clang-format

[Julien Grall <julien@xen.org>]

Hi,

On 16/10/2020 10:42, Anastasiia Lukianenko wrote:
> Thanks for your advices, which helped me improve the checker. I
> understand that there are still some disagreements about the
> formatting, but as I said before, the checker cannot be very flexible
> and take into account all the author's ideas.

I am not sure what you refer by "author's ideas" here. The checker 
should follow a coding style (Xen or a modified version):
    - Anything not following the coding style should be considered as 
invalid.
    - Anything not written in the coding style should be left 
untouched/uncommented by the checker.

> I suggest using the
> checker not as a mandatory check, but as an indication to the author of
> possible formatting errors that he can correct or ignore.

I can understand that short term we would want to make it optional so 
either the coding style or the checker can be tuned. But I don't think 
this is an ideal situation to be in long term.

The goal of the checker is to automatically verify the coding style and 
get it consistent across Xen. If we make it optional or it is 
"unreliable", then we lose the two benefits and possibly increase the 
contributor frustration as the checker would say A but we need B.

Therefore, we need to make sure the checker and the coding style match. 
I don't have any opinions on the approach to achieve that.

Cheers,

-- 
Julien Grall