On Fri, 3 Oct 2025 at 18:54, John Hubbard <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The main complaint with rustfmt is that it is extremely twitchy and
> unstable with respect to one-line, vs. multi-line output.
>
> *Especially* with "use" statements.
The reason I'd like to fix the rules for "use" statements in
particular is that they do get a rather high rate of conflicts, and
then the "multiple entries per line" is actually very annoying
(because the merge turns into a "figure out small change within a
line" rather than "one line from side A, one line from side B").
And that's not because "use" lines are bad - it's actually pretty
natural, and is very similar to what we see with #include lines in C
files. Those too get much higher rate of conflicts than normal code,
and it simply isn't a problem: the conflicts are trivial to resolve.
Because unlike normal code where different people typically work on
different functions etc, the header includes - and for Rust, the "use"
lines - are kind of that shared area where everybody who makes a
change does so in the same place.
So conflicts in that area are normal and expected, and not generally a
sign of any problem.
But then that "small-items" rule makes for extra pain in this area.
Is it a _huge_ pain? No. But it's an unnecessary annoyance, I feel.
IOW, I really think "use" is fundamentally somewhat different from the
other Rust cases.
Linus
