Re: devscripts: wrap-and-sort should default to -ast

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Wed, 2021-02-10 at 11:47:12 +0000, Phil Morrell wrote:
> As a user of -satb, I'd like to point out that the flags are not all
> equal. Two of them support a (more objective?) desire that "addition to
> a list in line-based VCS should have no deletions". That is -at, whereas
> -s is a subjective prettifier and -b could remove information, hence -k.

To me, all the flags in -ast are objectively superior to their
counterparts. In the case of -s even more so, in addition to what has
been mentioned of avoiding reindenting on field renames which does not
necessarily mean the official field name gets changed (which is indeed
very unusual), but the field being renamed in debian/control, say from
Recommends to Suggests; it is also superior because:

 1) it avoids VCS noise, by not putting the first value on the first
    line as the field itself,

    Depends: foo,
             bar,

    instead of:

    Depends:
     foo,
     bar,

 2) it allows trivial copy&paste or syncs, between say build-dependencies
    and run-time dependencies. Say you have this:

    Source: foo
    Build-Depends: some-dep-dev,
                   other-dep-dev,

    Package: foo-dev
    Depends: some-dep-dev,
             other-dep-dev,

    which means you have to copy, possibly remove the field, then
    reindent, which is rather annoying.

I agree that -b is something else entirely, and in many cases I prefer
ordering depending on relationship, layers or importance of the
packages involved.

> To make that work as a default, there would need to be something like an
> --short-preferred-unless-existing-indent to prevent constant
> reformatting. I disagree with jonas on the importance of -s because I'm
> not convinced that field names change, especially not often.

See above. But, I'd actually say it's perhaps as important or more
than -t! :)

Thanks,
Guillem