Thread

Re: CI: Add task that runs pgindent

Florents Tselai <florents.tselai@gmail.com> — 2025-10-21T13:39:43Z

> On 21 Oct 2025, at 3:19 PM, Jelte Fennema-Nio <me@jeltef.nl> wrote:
> 
> At PGConf.dev 2025 one thing that came up in the "Scaling PostgreSQL
> Development" unconference session is that new hackers don't know all the
> details of our development flow by heart yet. Of course it's documented
> on the wiki, but even if they find the relevant wiki pages they often
> still miss/forget things. One of the things they often forget is
> formatting their code. The consensus at that session was that it was
> probably worth adding a CI task for this to nudge newcomers to indent
> their code.
> 
> We're not too worried about this new requirement scaring away newcomers,
> since autoformatting has become fairly commonplace in open source
> development. Also committers can of course still choose to format the
> patch themselves before committing if the formatting is failing.
> 
> This might also help reduce the number of unindented commits that
> committers push, which require a follow up "fix indent" commit to make
> the koel buildfarm animal happy again.
> <v1-0001-CI-Add-task-that-runs-pgindent.patch>

I wonder if adding a pre-commit Git hook (for example under .git/hooks/pre-commit) might be an equally or even more suitable way to handle this?

That wouldn’t preclude having a CI task as well, of course.
The hook would mainly help contributors catch formatting issues locally, while the CI task would serve as a failsafe for committers.