#244 Allow for alternatives (formatting exceptions)
I have a need for just a handful of files to be formatted differently than all the rest of the sources in our project. My fellow team members agree that it would be best (more readable and maintainable) in this instance to differ from the project-wide preferences for just these files.
But other than excluding these files entirely from Jalopy, it's not clear how to accomplish this. In this case there is only one setting that needs to be different -- all the other project formatting should still be used.
Creating a separate preferences.dat file is a brittle solution, due to the redundancy/duplication. In this case the separate files would be identical except for one setting. People would need to remember to edit them both if one needed to be changed.
I can brainstorm a few possible solutions.
One would be to utilize annotations for formatting exceptions and/or setting overrides. This seems like the cleanest solution. A new setting to disallow this could be introduced for shops which do not want to allow this flexibility.
Another solution would be to allow multiple convention files to be specified, with latter files superseding the settings in earlier files. Ideally the convention file format would allow just a subset of settings to be specified (rather than everything), to mitigate the "brittleness" concern raised above. It seems this would require multiple Jalopy runs with the codebase files separated out to use the various convention files. This is clearly a messier solution for developers to use.
Yet another solution would be to introduce some new syntax into the convention file for conditional formatting based on filenames, directories, packages, etc. This may be the easiest to implement.
Regardless of the implementation, the goal would be to permit sets of "formatting exceptions" to be easily defined and applied to a subset of the files in a project. Thanks.