[petsc-dev] Coding style and its violations...

[Barry Smith]

On Jan 15, 2013, at 2:42 PM, Karl Rupp <rupp at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> quoting a recent commit:
> 
> > BarryFSmith committed 16 hours ago (raw commit)
> >
> > silly code formatting problems; some people still need to read the
> > style guide
> 
> So we have a style guide that is partially respected, partially ignored. Some things are pretty hard to check automatically, while others are rather simple. So let's pick
>  "No tabs are allowed in any of the source code."
> as an example and run
> 
> $petsc-dev/src> find . -name *.h -type f | xargs grep -P '\t' | wc -l
> 
> to pick the number of violations in .h-files. I get 3215 hits, which is still small compared to the 8797 hits in .c-files.

   It takes little more time to fix the problem then detect it :-)
> 
> So, what can we do to reduce the number of violations of the style guide and keep the number of violations as small as possible in the future?
> 
> - First and foremost, eliminate (as many of the) existing violations (as possible) and come to a clean state.

   Yes
> 
> - Run pre-push-scripts on bitbucket on the diff. They may not find all violations, but at least check for the most obvious ones.

   Yes. Jed is too in love with Git to ever do this so you have to.
> 
> - Add nightly tests on the source tree. We can compare the output of a properly configured uncrustify against the existing source files and complain on a mismatch.

     The problem is that uncrustify is exactly the PETSc style so we can't do that comparison automatically. Otherwise we would just run uncrustify on all pushes.

> 
> Unless there are objections, I'm willing to devote some time on that while playing with options for a better testing environment. I don't think that a full elimination of all violations is ever possible nor reasonably attainable. However, a reduction of violations simplifies the handling of the code base considerably and is thus worth the effort.

   Yes

> 
> Best regards,
> Karli
>