[0027] Formatter for Ekapkgs

[jonringer]

Formatters help to avoid a lot of potential merge conflicts and review churn.

[nrdxp]

solid assessment, as a personal user of alexandra can't really argue

[tgunnoe]

agree as well, I miss that container space

[srid]

FWIW, I've never had to do this.

Also, one "pro" of nixpkgs-fmt is that it doesn't break arguments into multiple lines like alejandra does!

[jonringer]

neither have I. But I would also write pretty close to what nixpgks-fmt would output

[nrdxp]

TIL I learned alejandra added experimental configuration options. Perhaps instead of forking, upstream would accept a patch to optionally re-enable container space?

[sshine]

One downside of alejandra is that its IDE support does not progressively parse errors, so if an error occurs, it exits with an error code and a small error pop-up occurs in VSCode. I might be mixing up formatting and LSP/linting, but as a total experience, there's room for improvement.

Still, the output is nice and the codebase is healthy. I like it.

[sshine]

Two things mentioned on Discord are:

• If alejandra allows for options to tweak its long argument list behavior (it seems to only support indentation = "TwoSpaces | FourSpaces | Tabs" on main), that might count up; Then its main downside is that its IDE integration is sub-par compared to e.g. Rust's which just silently exits on invalid syntax.
• nixpkgs-fmt might work even though it's not actively developed. Then its main downside seems to be its convergence towards correct formatting.

If active maintenance is a lower factor, forking one and applying moderate changes might also be an option.

[jonringer]

I would like to investigate nixpkgs-fmt, I'm fine with not everything being super deterministic. I just want readibility.