Transformation of contrib/check_GNU_style.sh to a python script

[Martin Sebor]

On 05/15/2017 07:55 AM, Martin Liška wrote:
> Hello.
>
> Recently I've been working on bigger changes to dump infrastructure and I had to
> fix tens of formatting issues reported by check_GNU_style.sh script. The script works
> quite fine, but it's very unpleasant that it reports problematic lines in the patch,
> not in original patches.

I was a little confused by this but in the end decided that you
must have meant "not in the original sources."  I can see how
having the script generate a patch to fix the problems it finds
could be handy.

  I decided to substitute part of functionality by Python
> script that uses a library that parses patches. So that reported errors can be
> easily converted to quickfix list for VIM. That makes navigation very easy.
>
> I'm attaching simple version that I made in couple of minutes and I would like to
> ask whether the bash script is broadly used and whether community would be interested
> in transformation of the script?

I use the script less and less as I become more comfortable with
the GCC style, and I don't expect to be making significant changes
to it.  I'm sure it can be improved and/or simplified but I have
developed a (shell/awk/sed) script of my own that automatically
fixes most of these little things for me while applying a patch,
so I don't have to worry about them while writing code.

That said, I don't really see a very compelling reason to rewrite
this script in Python or other high-level language, or add another
dependency for contributors to have to remember to install to use
it.  I'd rather see the effort invested into a smart commit hook
that would format all code for us the expected way automatically.
(That would save enough hassle to justify introducing a dependency
on almost any language or library ;-)

Martin