Kyle Lippincott [off-list ref] writes:

On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 11:00 AM Karthik Nayak [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The current value for the column limit is set to 80. While this is as
expected, we often prefer readability over this strict limit. This means
it is common to find code which extends over 80 characters. So let's
change the column limit to be 96 instead. This provides some slack so we
can ensure readability takes preference over the 80 character hard
limit.

Signed-off-by: Karthik Nayak <redacted>
---
 .clang-format | 5 ++++-
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/.clang-format b/.clang-format
index 41969eca4b..684ab32d28 100644
--- a/.clang-format
+++ b/.clang-format

@@ -12,7 +12,10 @@ UseTab: Always
 TabWidth: 8
 IndentWidth: 8
 ContinuationIndentWidth: 8
-ColumnLimit: 80
+
+# While we recommend keeping column limit to 80, we want to also provide
+# some slack to maintain readability.
+ColumnLimit: 96

 # C Language specifics
 Language: Cpp
--

2.47.0

I think this means that the next automated `clang-format` invocation
will un-wrap lines that were wrapped at 80 columns (not characters)
but fit in 96 columns. Modifying this setting and running
`clang-format -i *.{c,h}` produces a lot of diffs of that kind. I
don't think there's a way of setting a soft column limit in
clang-format.

Ah! Good point.

Personally, I'd be fine with a higher column limit, but we'd need to
make a conscious change to the style guidelines for that.

With this, I would say that the best choice here would be to actually
set it to 0 like the previous version. So that we don't actually enforce
the column limit.

We could perhaps set the value here in the '.clang-format' to 0. While
also setting 'max_line_length = 95' in the '.editorconfig'. That would
mean that we don't enforce a width, but we nudge editors to wrap at 95
characters. Here contributors would still have the power to decide the
adequate width as needed.