gst-indent-1.0
gst-indent is a fork of GNU indent 2.2.12, stripped down to the basics and using Meson as its build system in order to be easily buildable as part of the GStreamer monorepo on Windows, macOS and Linux and to provide convenient source code formatting verification on these systems.
By default it also applies the indent options GStreamer uses for its formatting.
The reason we use a custom fork is that GNU indent frequently changes the formatted output in a way that is not backwards-compatible on new releases, and often without an option to toggle it back to the previous way of formatting things. That then forces us to re-indent the entire code base accordingly or tell developers to stick to an older version, which isn't really a viable strategy with people using a wide range of distros and distro versions for their development environment.
By using our custom fork we can stay in control when to apply which updates to the formatter tool and the formatting, and also provide out-of-the-box local indentation verification to Windows users working in an MSVC environment.
Installation
gst-indent is published as a pypi project and it can be installed with pipx or pip (pipx being the recommended option), using the following command:
pipx install gst-indentIf you are using Python >= 3.11 and you prefer to install with pip, you can safely install it system-wide with --break-system-packages since the package only provides the gst-indent-1.0 binary and it does not install any python package that can break the system packages.
The installation process will use one of the pre-built wheels or it will build gst-indent during the installation process if there isn't an pre-build weel for your OS/CPU/libc combination.
gst-indent can also be built from sources with meson:
meson setup builddir
meson compile -C builddir
meson install -C builddir