Hi Nico,
(I Cc'd a few folks to make sure this bubbles up in their mailboxes because they engaged in that type of discussion which made this current round necessary)
Thanks for starting this thread. Let's make sure that it's the last one on this topic.
Do we want to enforce a single editor / IDE + configuration for coreboot
contributions? For instance, Vim is quite configurable and helpful when
writing code. This could make all tools for later processing unneces-
sary.
Practically speaking: that's not going to happen.
Do we want to enforce a single tool, e.g. clang-format, that does the
job for us after editing a source file?
If we go for strict coding style adherence requirements that would avoid having to manually review for coding style, which means less talking about it, which in my book is a plus.
The above, even if that implies a new coding style that we might not
be used to?
Whatever we have is at most a recommendation for now. Unless we keep coding style enforcement at the advisory level, things will have to change.
Do we want a combination of such a tool and check-patch?
Checkpatch is a set of regular expressions and as such we should rather try to get away from it as that is rather brittle by design. Since that will spark discussions about this every time the tool breaks, is rather get rid of it to the extent possible.
Combining multiple tools that weren't build for working together will only show the differences in their interpretation of the rules. We saw that already.
More generally speaking, I don't care on what we agree here, I just don't want to hear about that crap anymore, so please let's agree on something.
Having tools normalize the tree looks like an opportunity to reduce the amount of talk about coding style even more, so there's a weak preference to that on my part solely because of that.
And yes, that means that I also don't care what "compliant" source files look like in the end: if there's agreement to standardize on GNU style C with a strict line length of 40 characters, I'll be fine with that just the same.
Patrick