Re the reformatting PR, it is truly great! However I am concerned about merging such a big disruptive PR, causing merge conflicts for every outstanding change, while we're in a CI crisis and having trouble getting anything merged.

yea, i'd agree with waiting a bit.

Yeah, maybe we can declare a window in which we can get a lot of outstanding changes merged, and not start any new ones (or at least, do so at your own risk).

I think chunks will cause more pain than in-one-go, because they will make the process of rebasing your code post-black more manual. See this comment for an explanation: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/8391#issuecomment-538481579

yea.

spending the time we’re spending on formatting on helping to clean up CI would be excellent

While I agree 100% that fixing CI is a priority because the situation is a big workflow painpoint to contributing to pants at the moment, I don’t think it’s really opposed to the goal of removing an orthogonal workflow painpoint around manual formatting of code. Personally, being new to pants, I felt like the formatting thing was an area where I could easily contribute because it doesn’t require much contextual knowledge unlike CI stabilization, and I felt like it would be a good use of my time because it’s something where a limited time investment can yield a paper cut fix for everyone from that point on. Sounded like an appropriate hackweek goal. Whichever fire we’re putting out, there will always be more fires to put out somewhere else, so I feel like delaying merging a change that is an improvement because some other improvements are needed too doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense to me. Absolutely amped for also making CI less flakey, though. That is an extremely worthy goal and will have a big positive impact on contributions 😄

The rewrite patch is definitely valuable... no doubt about it. But it's also very easy to re-generate. So finding a good low friction time to land it doesn't seem like much to ask.

I mean, most of my changes are all in now, so it's really down to other people with outstanding changes. If they're willing to put up with merge conflicts, I won't get in the way. But I would like to see very clear and widely disseminated documentation on how to run the formatter in a merge conflict situation.

@happy-kitchen-89482 : Does Monday work if they do that?

And just to clarify why this is so entangled with the CI issue: Unfortunately Travis merges the latest master into your topical branch before running CI. I would love to turn that off, but have yet to figure out how or even if it's possible. So once this formatting change is merged, no one can push any changes to their topical branches without first dealing with the merge conflict.

Totally.

Yes, all above makes complete sense to me 👍