Re: [PATCH] Add an EditorConfig file

[Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>]

Hi brian,

Thanks for CC-ing me on this.

I use editorconfig every day via the configuration in my home directory
[1], and the Vim plugin editorconfig-vim [2]. It's a great piece of
software, and I've been using it without any issue since around the
beginning of 2015.

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 11:03:07PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> Regardless, providing such a file allows users to automatically
> configure their editor of choice with the correct settings by default.

I think that this is the central argument to be made here for keeping
this out of contrib/, and in the root tree. Most editor (all?) plugins
will pick this location up automatically, which ought to cut down on
patches that aren't formatted correctly.

> Provide global settings to set the character set to UTF-8 and insert a
> final newline into files.  Provide language-specific settings for C,
> Shell, Perl, and Python files according to what CodingGuidelines already
> specifies.  Since the indentation of other files varies, especially
> certain AsciiDoc files, don't provide any settings for them until a
> clear consensus forward emerges.
>
> Don't specify an end of line type.  While the Git community uses
> Unix-style line endings in the repository, some Windows users may use
> Git's auto-conversion support and forcing Unix-style line endings might
> cause problems for those users.

Good. Even the official editorconfig documentation specifies that this
ought to be the responsibility "of the VCS" [3], a point on which I
agree.

> +[*.{c,h,sh,perl}]
> +indent_style = tab
> +tab_width = 8

In all *.[ch] files in git.git, I found a total of 817 lines over 79
characters wide:

  $ for file in $(git ls-files '**/*.[ch]'); do
      awk 'length > 79' $f;
    done | wc -l

So I think that specifying indent_style, and tab_width to be 'tab' and
'8' respectively is enough. We shouldn't be enforcing a rule about line
lengths that we are not ourselves consistently following.

Have you thought about including guidelines on COMMIT_EDITMSG? We prefer
72 characters per line [3], and this is enforceable via the following:

  [COMMIT_EDITMSG]
  max_line_length = 72

Thanks,
Taylor

[1]: https://github.com/ttaylorr/dotfiles/blob/work-gh/editorconfig/.editorconfig
[2]: https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig-vim
[3]: http://public-inbox.org/git/20170930070127.xvtn7dfyuoh26mhp@sigill.intra.peff.net