Fwd: Re: source formatting: what is supposed to be automatic now?

[Milian Wolff]

On Monday 28 November 2011 16:30:55 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 28.11.11 15:11:47, Milian Wolff wrote:
> > forwarding to kdevelop-devel
> > 
> > 
> > ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
> > 
> > Subject: Re: source formatting: what is supposed to be automatic now?
> > Date: Monday 28 November 2011, 13:55:20
> > From: David Nolden <david.nolden.kdevelop at art-master.de>
> > To: Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de>
> > 
> > 2011/11/28 Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de>:
> > > Personally though, I find it not very usable yet though. It would be
> > > really
> > > cool if we could get a proper UI for configuring uncrustify. Otherwise
> > > our
> > > formatting settings dialog simply makes no sense, as the preview will
> > > not
> > 
> > work
> > 
> > > at all. I bet that people using KDevelop will compare the script
> > > formatter
> > > with the astyle formatter, see that the latter is much easier to
> > > configure
> > 
> > and
> > 
> > > use that. Most people won't know uncrustify or know that it is much more
> > > powerful than astyle...
> > 
> > There is a GUI to configure uncrustify, it's an application called
> > "universalindentgui". I don't like the idea of creating even more
> > hardly maintainable GUI code.
> > 
> > It's totally fine if people use astyle because it's easier to
> > configure. A consistent formatting using uncrustify is mainly
> > interesting for larger shared projects which want to enforce
> > consistency, like us, and for such projects, I don't see a problem in
> > configuring uncrustify _once_ (for example using universalindentgui)
> > and then distributing the configuration as part of the source code.
> > 
> > You have the option: Either you use the simple built-in astyle which
> > is easy to set-up but not shareable, or you use the powerful
> > custom-script based formatting which is more difficult to configure
> > initially, but then can be arbitrarily powerful and easily shared.
> 
> I agree with David in so far, that for a 'custom script formatter'
> tool all configuration thats necessary inside KDevelop is telling it
> which script to use for formatting and potentially any commandline
> arguments necessary (it would be nice if things like
> <SELECTED_TEXT> <CURRENT_FILE> <PROJECT_DIR> etc. could be used in the
> commandline invocation).

besides selected text, the other two are already implemented by David as far 
as I can see.

> Configuration of that script, or the tools used by such a custom script
> cannot be the purpose of KDevelop.

I agree with both of you here.

> That being said, if we ship a general-purpose script ourselves that we
> know relies on a certain tool it might be cool to make this script a
> first-class citizen among the formatters and provide dedicated GUI
> configuration for the tools it uses.
>
> And IMHO configuring a formatter without a GUI is plain useless unless
> the formatter only supports certain built-in types of formatting. When
> being able to define very fine-grained how the source should look I bet
> everybody wants instant feedback of how a given option changes the
> formatting. Not only to verify the option does what the user expects it
> to do, but also to easily see limitations of the tool.

Exactly my musings. The stuff David wrote is immensely useful, but it could be 
so much more if it had a proper GUI. Optimally we would incorporate 
universalindentergui into our config dialog, via some library :)

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