[FR]: Should keep-sorted by a formatter?

[antspy]

What is the current behavior?

Keep-sorted is currently integrated as a linter, not as a formatter.

Describe the feature

Should keep-sorted by a formatter instead of a linter? My motivations are:

1. If I have a // keep-sorted start section, I obviously want this to be sorted. So auto-formatting it to be sorted seems only natural.
2. bazel lint works on bazel targets, I cannot lint a random file. But often I would need // keep-sorted on files which are not in any bazel targets, e.g. devcontainer.json to sort the list of extensions, or pyproject.toml to sort the list of linting tools, etc.

Let me know if you think this makes sense!

[alexeagle]

Take a look at the root README where I lay out the principles of format vs. lint. In particular formatters are never allowed to change the program's behavior, so that we can hook them into a DX where developers have no choice, and it's safe to apply them blindly across a whole repo including other teams' legacy code.
Changing the order of lines can definitely break things, so I don't think it's safe enough to do blindly.

[alexeagle]

I should add, yes it's frustrating under my formulation that you need your devcontainer.json to be in a filegroup target simply so an aspect can visit it. I could imagine a third category of DX which is "run outside Bazel but require manual review". It feels to me like that probably exceeds the complexity budget - we gain a lot from the simple mental model.

[antspy]

Ok, I see - yes I understand that keep-sorted is not safe enough to be used as a formatter.

Perhaps the easiest way would be to instead integrate it into the editor (outside of bazel) so that every file can be "linted" as such.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any editor extensions doing that at the moment (at least for vscode). Will look into it!

[alexeagle]

Maybe you can simply bazel run @com_github_google_keep_sorted//:keep-sorted - using the binary that's provided here but not hooking with either the linter or formatter. You could put it in pre-commit.