On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 02:56:22AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> > > * We should not ship editor-specific files in the main directory of the
> > > repository.
> >
> > Why not?
>
> Best practices indicate that we don't check in files which are specific
> to a developer. Anything that controls the specific editor people use
> is by definition specific to the developer. Checking in these files
> leads to conflicts over which settings to apply and whose settings are
> better when they could just be avoided.
I think that's a good general policy, but it's not unreasonable to
help people make configure some widely used tools. The key things to me
are:
- we should do so at the most general level possible. I agree that
.editorconfig is the right level for features it supports. But
there are bits being suggested here that I think it does not (like
how to indent case labels).
We also have .clang-format, for which there's a vim plugin (but I've
not used it, nor editorconfig, myself). It seems like it may support
more options.
- people who use the editor config take responsibility for maintaining
it, and nobody else needs to care. E.g., I'd expect editorconfig to
more of a source of truth than any vim config, and if there's a
conflict for people who care about vim to sort it out (and not
somebody who touched .editorconfig).
- it doesn't suggest any actions that might be bad practices. I agree
that the instructions for auto-loading this .vimrc are more
complicated than necessary and might have security implications.
Carrying a file in contrib/vim that says "copy this to ~/.vim/foo"
or even "copy these lines to your ~/.vimrc" seems a lot safer. And
it makes it easier for people who prefer to adapt the config to
their own setup.
So I'm not opposed to carrying some vim config, but I think it's best to
focus on simplicity and providing human-readable instructions, rather
than ad-hoc plugin infrastructure.
-Peff
