Editor config and code formatting

[David Perry <boolean263 () gmail com>]

Hi all,

Bottom line up front: how much do people care about the formatting of 
Wireshark's source code?

Background: I'm looking into [#17253][1]. It's chiefly about removing 
editor modelines from the footer of each source file in favour of just 
using `.editorconfig` files. But by extension it's also about removing 
the exceptions from `.editorconfig` files and making the formatting 
rules consistent across files.

I took a manual pass at harmonizing the formatting of the C files in the 
root of the repo and that was painful, so I researched automatic 
approaches for the rest of our code. [Clang-Format][2] seems to be a 
popular approach for this sort of thing.

Automatic code formatters in general, and clang-format in particular, 
are rigid and somewhat naïve in how they do things. This is in contrast 
to the flexible formatting practices we use. That's not a huge deal if 
we just want to reformat once to harmonize our indentation levels and 
whatnot, and then return to manually formatting based on the new standard.

On the other hand, a comment on !6298 suggested that automatic 
reformatting could be integrated as a pre-commit hook and/or a CI step. 
That... also isn't a huge deal, I guess. We'd have consistency across 
files at the price of slightly less formatting freedom. (And of having 
another developer prerequisite to install, if we did it as a pre-commit 
hook.)

But it's a decision that should be made by the dev community as a whole. 
So what do you folks think? Is consistent formatting important to you? 
Would you like to see it enforced with an automatic formatter?

(My proposed `.clang-format` file is in [!6298][3] and aims to capture 
the most common practices used across the codebase. Please use that MR 
for discussions about specific formatting details. This email is for the 
general discussion of whether/how to apply and enforce formatting.)

Thanks for your time,

David Perry
he/him

[1]: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues/17253
[2]: https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.1/tools/clang/docs/ClangFormat.html
[3]: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/merge_requests/6298
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