Formatting ratchet

spotless {
  ratchetFrom 'origin/master'
  ...

In this mode, spotless will filter the target further, to only apply to files which have changed since origin/master. This is similar to https://github.com/diffplug/spotless/issues/178 (only apply to staged files), but imo strictly better.

Lots of people are reticent to the “mega-format-commit” that happens when you go from human-formatted to machine-formatted, and this would solve this issue. It also helps to keep copyright headers up-to-date (ours aren’t). Best of all, it doesn’t rely on you to run the formatter before you commit. If you commit without formatting, Spotless will still remind you in the PR, ensuring that there’s no need for humans to argue about formatting.

[t-rad679]

If something “ratchets”, then it can get tighter but not looser. For example, let’s say you use something like SpotBugs for the first time on your project. You’ll get 1,000 errors, and it will take a long time to fix them. Rather than fixing them all right now, you can say “our CI policy is to create no new errors, and it’s okay if you remove old errors” aka “tighter but not looser” aka “ratchet”.

Thanks for the explanation! That’s clever naming and I think it does do what I would expect.

Based on our previous conversations, I think we have irreconcilable differences around “convention-over-configuration” and default behaviors 😃

Fair enough 😃.

I don’t understand either of these sentences, probably because target means “a group of files to format” to me, and you’re using it to mean something else. If the paragraphs above didn’t answer your question, try to write documentation for the flags you’d like to see - that would help me understand what you want.

By source and target, I mean the source and target branches of a merge…i.e., the source would be a feature branch or a working copy and the target is typically the default branch (usually master). In other words, the files I would want to run Spotless on in this more general case could be gotten with the following command:

git diff --name-status --diff-filter=dr <target> <source>

This is what I’ve been trying to use in the absence of the feature this ticket is about.

The feature I’m describing would be more versatile, but, after thinking about it some more, I don’t really think what I want to do is Spotless’s job. I think there is a way one could use git with Spotless to make this happen (once I can get -PspotlessFiles to work properly) and that honestly seems more appropriate, though I’m not sure I can articulate why my mind changed. I could still probably be convinced back

[nedtwigg]

Released in maven 2.0.0, and much-improved in plugin-gradle 4.5.0.