add formatting hook

[Oblarg]

Adds formatting hook to automatically wpiformat any staged files on commit. Can be installed by running npm install .

[ThadHouse]

I am 100% not a fan of this. Npm is a plague that should be avoided at all costs. It also seems extremely niche. I don't want to be more responsible for npm and dependency bugs when they occur like they always do.

[Oblarg]

It's a dev dependency, whose only purpose is to dump some stuff into git hooks once. This particular toolchain is extremely popular and well-maintained, and if you freeze the versions there's really nothing to worry about.

If you don't like it, you can just ignore it; it doesn't interact with the rest of the code in any way.

[calcmogul]

It's a dev dependency, whose only purpose is to dump some stuff into git hooks once

Couldn't we do the same thing with a few lines of bash/bat script instead of thousands of lines of Node stuff?

[Oblarg]

you'd have to essentially reimplement lint-staged, which isn't impossible but also isn't trivial - the nifty thing about lint-staged is that it correctly handles the formatting entirely in the git staging area

[calcmogul]

I'd rather do that. It's not hard in principle: when the commit hook is called, you get a list of staged files (there's a git plumbing command for that), call wpiformat -f with the staged filenames, then re-add the same filenames to the staging area.

[Oblarg]

relevant: diffplug/spotless#791 (comment)

[Oblarg]

perhaps we could build this into wpiformat?

[calcmogul]

Commit hooks are not wpiformat's responsibility. The commit hook setup should be done in a separate script. It's not hard to add hooks manually either, so I'm not sure even the setup should be automated.

Here's an example pre-commit hook: https://blog.jdriven.com/2020/11/formatting-in-pre-commit-hook/

[Oblarg]

That example doesn't handle partially-staged files correctly, which is basically the only part of lint-staged that isn't trivial.

[calcmogul]

I don't know why you'd ever want to only partially run the formatter on a file, but OK. Stash the unstaged changes, run wpiformat on the staged files, add them to the staging area, then unstash the unstaged files at the end. Still not hard if you know the git one-liners to do those things.

[calcmogul]

This PR reminds me of this blog post: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/

Basically, we shouldn't use overcomplicated and overkill tooling and environments (Node in this case) when a simple shell script will do the same job.

[PeterJohnson]

Consensus is not to merge this as-is. A less complex post-hook (e.g. shell script) might be more acceptable.