Adding tools to help with clang-format to repo

[pmolodo]

Hi all - I wanted to add some utilties to the repo to make it easier to avoid clang-format issues.

At minimum, I wanted to add a binary command which will run clang-format on the entire repo (or specified files).

I'd like to also add support for pre-commit, to have an easy way to set up pre-commit hooks that ensure clang-format is run. This would just entail adding an extra file, .pre-commit-config.yaml, to the repo root; for those that did not wish to use pre-commit, they could simply ignore it. (Or, if they want to set up their own hooks, they could use it as a starting reference point.)

Would anyone else find this helpful, or have objections?

[kxl-adsk]

Hi Paul, All,

Developers have many different options available when setting up clang-format. Let's list them here:

• IDEs level integration - most commonly used have one, like Visual Studio or VS Code
• Git integration - using git clang-format
• Git hooks - using pre-commit
• Command-line executable - clang-format -i

I don't have any objections to the proposal. Just curious to find out which options people are preferring?

Cheers,
KxL

[ppt-adsk]

I usually use git clang-format, and clang-format -i on occasion.

[seando-adsk]

I also run "git clang-format" from the command-line and have it setup to auto-format in Visual Studio.

[pmolodo]

So, I've personally been using a combination of IDE integration and git hook (pre-commit).

I actually didn't realize that git clang-format was part of llvm / clang, though - so I might give that a shot.

I like the git hook, though, because it's a form of last-step-assurance... ie, it's easy to have non-formatted changes squeak in through other avenues (most common for me - when making edits in a merge-resolution tool), and this stops those before they're committed. And, as I said, by simply providing the .pre-commit-config.yaml file, you're just giving folks the option for easily setting up pre-commit - for those who don't want it, it can be ignored.

Lastly - one thing none of these have (at least as far as I could tell?) was an easy way to run clang-format on the entire repo. That's not necessarily something that needs to be done frequently, but can be handy on occasion. Thus the addition of a separate run-clang-format.py tool in my PR.

Now that I know that git clang-format is available by default, though, if we decide we don't need / want a format-the-whole-repo tool, I can remove it and make the .pre-commit-config.yaml rely on git clang-format...