We have a very diverse team of developers. Each developer prefers a very different source code indentation and formatting style. Beautifier/pretty printer tools exist that can output in each of these developers’ preferred styles. Our code is stored in a Mercurial repository in a standard formatting style, using a commit hook.
However, I would like to go a bit further. Is it possible to beautify the source code into the developer’s preferred style when he clones/pulls/updates his workspace? That way, he would see all code in his preferred style. When he/she commits the code gets beautified back into the standard formatting style of the central repository.
Is there a hook I can use to beautify files before being updated/checked out?
How would that work during merging? Can the others files we are merging against also be beautified using a chosen style (as to minimize the amount of conflicts)?
One possible way (in theory) to implement that would be through encode/decode filters, but I don’t think it is worth it, because of all the potential side-effects.
It is best to have some kind of format reinforcement in a centralized place, reject any push to a centralized repo if said centralized repo detects code incorrectly formatted.
That reminds the coder to use the “official” (and unique) code format in place for the current project.