source formatting: what is supposed to be automatic now?

[Milian Wolff]

Pushing to kdevelop-devel again, see comments inline below.

On Sunday 27 November 2011 20:23:23 David Nolden wrote:
> Why don't you simply tell the user to disable the checkbox in the source
> formatter options?

What checkbox? You see, not even I knew about this, hence most others won't 
know about it either. If such big changes hit KDevelop, I'd very much 
appreciate if it could be announced on our mailing lists and maybe also on 
your blog. Such an announce should include:

- intention, goals
- how to use it
- known problems

After all people other than you will have to give user support. Without the 
above, I cannot do that.

> It would be inconsistent to make the behavior dependent on the selected
> formatter. Then it would even be better to disable the checkbox by default.

Yes please disable it.

> However, generally it's better to have it enabled, because only then
> generated code is consistent with the editor settings, and furthermore
> there should be only _one_ place where the indentation can be configured.

It is more important to be able to work on projects with inconsistent 
formatting. Remember that our formatter settings are stored per-session. So as 
soon as you are working on multiple projects with different formattings this 
will break. Lets not even start on per-directory / per-file settings...

> There are 2 cases where the checkbox should be enabled by default: On new
> projects, and when fine-grained formatting rules are available (eg.
> format_sources files). The question is when to do such a decision..

Again, see above: Even if you create a new project, as soon as you open 
another one with different formattings, this will break. I agree that the 
setting should be enabled implictly, when using uncrustify and a 
format_sources file is found. But this is so far a very small percentage of our 
users. 

> Well maybe it would be best to allow setting "Automatic" mode right within
> kate (should be enabled by default then though), then the settings would
> come from the formatter by default, and could be overridden in kate using
> modelines or .kateconfig.

What exactly do you mean with "automatic" mode here? Should the related editor 
configuration GUI be disabled? The actions in the menu be disabled?

Bye
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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