Cloning a plugin reformats the code

vvvv beta bug
1

Whenever you clone an existing dynamic plugin, vvvv completely reformats the code. It moves opening curly-braces that were on their own lines to be at the end of preceding lines, and it moves comments following closing curly-braces to be on their own line after the brace. And those are just the obvious ones I’ve noticed.

Regardless of what one thinks the “correct” style is, a primary rule of professional and community coding is to follow the style and norms of the code you find yourself in. Doing wholesale reformatting of code is FUBAR. Besides making code potentially less readable to the original authors, it completely defeats code comparison, diffs, and comprehensible version tracking.

This should be turned off; it is an unnecessary and undesirable step. If someone wants to reformat code there are utilities to do that. At least make it an optional process.

2

I agree, it shouldn’t do that. But looking at the code which does the cloning I fear it’s not that easy as the transformation is done on the abstract syntax tree (AST) provided by a third-party library. The modified tree gets written back to disk apparently applying its own code formatting rules. Simply disabling them doesn’t seem to be possible.

But thanks for your feedback and should the time come that the dynamic plugin feature gets a major update it will certainly be considered.