Question

The company I work for gave me the project of moving their java project from CVS to Git.
For several reasons, they don’t want to use another tool than Eclipse. So we’re stuck with EGit.

I know it is possible to configure Eclipse to format code. But it seems like there is nothing that would prevent someone to use his own way of formatting the code.

So my question is, is it possible to refuse a commit with EGit if the code is not formatted correctly ? The reason behind this question is that we want to avoid conflicts due to the code format, which was a really big problem in CVS.

Thank you

Answer 1

I recommend setting the formatter and a save action to format code as a project-specific configuration. Then tracking the .settings directory in Git.

Because it’s configured in the project and in version control, developers won’t have to configure Eclipse themselves, it’s automatic.

We have done this with several projects and if you do it from the start, you will never have any ill-formatted code or discussions about it.

If a developer is really reluctant and even goes as far as unchecking the project-specific formatter and using another one, maybe you should have a talk.

(By the way, a recommended option in the formatter is Never join already wrapped lines, because sometimes the formatter will do weird wrapping. This option makes it possible to have control over wrapping.)