ktfmt rearranges comments on top of imports statements

Let’s say I have

import x
import y
//noinspection BannedImport
import z

ktfmt reformats it as

//noinspection BannedImport
import x
import y
import z

This is problematic because some linting tools use a comment to opt out of errors on an import statement. (for example android lint allows you to opt out of a import error with a comment, but then you run ktfmt and it rearranges the comments therefore causing lint to break again.

[nreid260]

That comment was from me. Both the AL team and I work at Google.

The word from the lint team is “Kotlin syntax doesn’t allow annotations on imports” With that said, it seems like it makes sense for ktfmt to be able to handle comments on import statements without being re-ordered. /shruggie

[nreid260]

From talking to the current maintainers:

• Comments on imports are more-or-less best effort
• Support has existed for at least 2 years
• The original focus was trailing comments
• There was initially a warning for comments on their own line, but it was disabled for ease-of-use
• There was minimal pushback on the “gluing” behaviour because
  • The Google repo is the primary target
  • The GJF authors have a lot of control over the tools running over Java code within Google
• No eval was done on alternative behaviors

At this point, if someone wants to make ktfmt behave like GJF, with gluing, that seems fine to me. As long as ktfmt doesn’t crash, or delete the comments, it works for us. Just be aware that there’s also weirdness in that approach.

Fundamentally, associating comments with other syntax is unspecified, so there will always be tools that chose to do it in a different way.