[coreboot] [RFC] How to prevent whitespace issues in patches?

[smithbone at gmail.com]

On 03/02/2013 04:55 AM, Paul Menzel wrote:

> Do you know of other solutions? For example, how do other projects
> handle this?

For the EC code at OLPC we had similar problems.  It was really bad for 
a while because we were forced to use the Keil development environment 
under a windows VM and thus also had to deal with line ending 
conversions.  Eventually we figured out how to run the command line 
compiler via wine and things got _so_ much nicer.

Our solution was that all code must pass through astyle with a 
formatting specifier that we agreed on.

http://astyle.sourceforge.net/

Astyle formatting is not perfect and there are a few formatting things 
it does that we just had to accept.  Also there were a few releases 
where astyle really mangled the code.  We require a specific version 
statically built and checked into the repository.

There was a flag day where we re-formatted the entire repository with 
astyle and then went from there.  Its pretty configurable so there 
wasn't actually too much churn as it almost exactly matched the existing 
style.

> How could that be solved elegantly? On the editor level, “git hook”
> level or can Gerrit be setup to do this?

You can set up git to run it on all commits and reject anything that 
astyle says it had to reformat.  But we choose to let that be done by 
humans.  The EC team at OLPC is small enough that if one dev forgets to 
run astyle before pushing patches we can whine at him.  In a much larger 
project I can seen the need auto rejecting it if astyle changes it.

-- 
Richard A. Smith
smithbone at gmail.com