Re: clang-format

On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 11:21 +0800, you wrote:

> Before I drop the proposal, though, are there any Mutt devs/contributors who
> would like to play devil's advocate?

It's been a long time since I have contributed to mutt, but seeing the
recent activity I do actually have some patches pending still that I'm
planning to (re-)submit. So I'll bite: I believe that it would be
super helpful to have a standard clang-format configuration for mutt
that's consistently applied across the code base.

The key to formatters like clang-format is *not* expecting them to get
every little piece of the layout precisely like you want it. They
won't, and that's ok. Humans also differ in where they break their
lines.

The value of formatters is somewhere else: once a project starts
consistently using them, suddenly nobody needs to spend any brain
power anymore on getting all those indentations and white space and
line break positions right. You can just ignore that whole minefield
because you know that clang-format will fix it before anything goes
upstream. Especially for external contributors, who don't have the
project's particular style down in their muscle memory, this
substantially lowers the barrier for getting a patch in shape. And it
helps the reviewers, too: no more "please move this brace over there".

The projects I'm primarily involved with have all switched to
automatic formatting at this point, and never looked back.

There are different ways to implement this of course. I'm also not a
fan of CI automatically reformatting code. But CI can reject code
that's not passing clang-format, with the developer then re-running it
locally, which is usually quick and easy. I know that there can be
some technical pitfalls here (like different clang-format versions
etc.), but honestely, the cases where I've run into this over many
years and compiler versions and groups of developers, remain very rare
and certainly don't outweigh the value of such tools.

So, bottom line: I realize that my word won't count much here, but
nevertheless I would suggest you all re-consider dropping this so
easily.

Best,

Robin


-- 
Robin Sommer * ICSI * [email protected] * www.icir.org/robin