Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:05): Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:05):@Oliver Bertuch introduced us to Spotless for formatting code in https://github.com/gdcc/xoai
From the README:
mvn spotless:apply
# - or to just check for consistency use -
mvn spotless:check
It works great! Should we use it with the main code base?
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:06):And the logo is awesome:
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:07):What did I do? :see_no_evil:
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:08):I have to admit, Spotless has its flaws...
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:09):You don't want it to apply on the main codebase...
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:09):Really you don't
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:09):D'oh! Why not? 
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:09):Same thing as getting rid of all the tab chars and other mistakes in styling
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:09):It's gonna be an ginormous blob of changes
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:10):What if it was a brand new Java project? Use Spotless?
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:10):Not sure. Spotless is very opinionated
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:11):It might be fine just using stuff like Sonarcloud or Checkstyle
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:11):And enforce it some more
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:11):At least Checkstyle is configurable...
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:11):Spotless is more or less not
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:12):We already have a Checkstyle config: https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.2/developers/coding-style.html#checking-your-formatting-with-checkstyle
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:12):Yeah
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:12):We do :melting_face:
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:13):The rules we have in there are never being applied...
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:13):No review is looking at this stuff
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:14):Not many people on the core team care about this... :face_with_hand_over_mouth:
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:14):Should use use Sonar instead? We do have this issue: Set up Sonar #9846
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:14):I really don't care which tool we use.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:14):And I'll adapt to whatever opinionated style.
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:15):Sure thing. All of the gdcc things I started use Sonarcloud
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:15):Are you using Sonarcloud for code formatting in any of those projects?
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:15):But no tool will get something moving. It's a social problem, no tech is gonna solve that.
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:16):Nope, I'm just using it for annotations and recommendations
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:16):You could make it more enforcing
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:16):Matter of configuration
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:16):Well, the problem is solved in our xoai library, right?
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:17):Which problem? Formatting?
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:17):We did use spotless on it... after a huge rewrite and on a much smaller codebase with far less folks involved
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:19):The social problem. I'm seeing some back and forth at https://github.com/gdcc/xoai/pull/119 about formatting. It looks like you ran Spotless here: https://github.com/gdcc/xoai/pull/119/commits/a70ea5d0b021a9b06eb65559fee8685ca54c67e2
Oliver Bertuch (Apr 12 2024 at 20:20):See what it did to the codebase? Crazy!
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 12 2024 at 20:20):That a70ea commit? Looks fine.
Oliver Bertuch (Jun 28 2024 at 19:05):Came across https://github.com/revelc/formatter-maven-plugin today. Sounds interesting. Enables definition of custom rules, not just adapting what others use like spotless.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jul 01 2024 at 17:57):Nice. Should we play around with it in a low-risk repo like https://github.com/gdcc/hello or https://github.com/gdcc/exporter-debug ?
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 20 2024 at 21:58):Some new comments from @Steven Winship: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11016#discussion_r1850852625
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 26 2025 at 15:27):@Oliver Bertuch do you have any ideas on this one? https://github.com/gdcc/exporter-croissant/issues/11
Oliver Bertuch (Mar 26 2025 at 17:27):Nope, none except moving away from spotless (see above) or trying to make it exclude xml files.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 26 2025 at 18:21):Sure, but do you have any idea what maven-release-plugin is doing?
Oliver Bertuch (Mar 26 2025 at 18:22):Nope. Lucky guess: it's the XML serialization. The release plugin manipulates the DOM, so maybe this is why.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 26 2025 at 18:27):yeah, maybe the flatten stuff 
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 26 2025 at 18:28):So you're suggesting trying https://github.com/revelc/formatter-maven-plugin instead of spotless?
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 26 2025 at 19:52):@Oliver Bertuch how does this grab ya as a workaround? https://github.com/gdcc/exporter-croissant/pull/12
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Oct 27 2025 at 13:26):From https://github.com/quarkusio/quarkus/discussions/40542 I learned the Quarkus project uses https://github.com/revelc/formatter-maven-plugin to format their code. See https://github.com/quarkusio/quarkus/blob/3.29.0/CONTRIBUTING.md#formatting
Last updated: Nov 01 2025 at 14:11 UTC