[RFC} running a formatter over the Java code

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 08/05/2014 10:26 AM, Noel Grandin wrote:
> Would there be any objections to my running a formatter over the
> existing Java LO code (with the exception of the newer Android stuff) ?
>
> Because at the moment
> - it has very little consistency
> - and it appears that at some point in time a tabs-to-spaces conversion
> was done, but not all the files followed the same tab-size convention,
> so some of the formatting is now REALLY out.

With no mechanism in place to automatically enforce a specific 
formatting algorithm, code formatted according to that algorithm will 
over time start to deviate from it again, anyway.  Hence, for already 
well-formatted code, arguably the only effect of such a reformatting is 
to make it harder to trace through the git history.

Therefore, an alternative approach could be to do a mass reformatting 
only for code that would truly benefit from it, like code whose broken 
tabs/spaces indentation has made it become "REALLY out" by now.  That 
would of course be a more laborious commit than a wholesale modification 
of all *.java files.

Or maybe I'm exaggerating the negative impact on browsing the git 
history, but that is at least what I feel after many a uses of git blame.

Stephan