clang-format: set 'ColumnLimit' to 0

When clang-format was introduced to the Git project in
6134de6 (clang-format: outline the git project's coding style,
2017-08-14), the 'ColumnLimit' was set to 80. This is inline with our
recommendation in 'Documentation/CodingGuidelines', which states:

  We try to keep to at most 80 characters per line.

However while this is recommended limit, this is not the enforced
limit. In some cases in we do overflow this limit to prioritize
readability. Setting the 'ColumnLimit' also means that shorter lines are
concatenated to simply as the result would still be below 80 characters,
which is undesirable.

In the past, we tried to adjust the penalties around line wrapping, once
in 42efde4 (clang-format: adjust line break penalties, 2017-09-29)
and another time in 5e9fa0f (clang-format: re-adjust line break
penalties, 2024-10-18). While these settings help tweak the line break
penalties to be more in-line with the requirements of the Git project,
using 'clang-format' still produces a lot of false positives.

So to make 'clang-format' more usable, set the 'ColumnLimit' to 0. This
means that line-wrapping is no-longer a concern of the formatter and
something that the user needs to take care of. The previous commit also
added a more flexible guideline to the '.editorconfig' setting a
'max_line_length' of 120 characters. This should provide some guidance
to users.

In the future, it would be nice to re-instate this limit with adequate
penalties which would follow our guidelines, but currently, it makes
more sense to have a working formatter which we can rely on and which
doesn't create too many false positives.

Signed-off-by: Karthik Nayak <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>

Author: KarthikNayak

.clang-format

@@ -12,7 +12,15 @@ UseTab: Always
 TabWidth: 8
 IndentWidth: 8
 ContinuationIndentWidth: 8
-ColumnLimit: 80
+
+# While we do want to enforce a character limit of 80 characters, we often
+# allow lines to overflow that limit to prioritize readability. Setting a
+# character limit here with penalties has been finicky and creates too many
+# false positives.
+#
+# NEEDSWORK: It would be nice if we can find optimal settings to ensure we
+# can re-enable the limit here.
+ColumnLimit: 0
 
 # C Language specifics
 Language: Cpp
@@ -210,16 +218,5 @@ MaxEmptyLinesToKeep: 1
 # No empty line at the start of a block.
 KeepEmptyLinesAtTheStartOfBlocks: false
 
-# Penalties
-# This decides what order things should be done if a line is too long
-PenaltyBreakAssignment: 5
-PenaltyBreakBeforeFirstCallParameter: 5
-PenaltyBreakComment: 5
-PenaltyBreakFirstLessLess: 0
-PenaltyBreakOpenParenthesis: 300
-PenaltyBreakString: 5
-PenaltyExcessCharacter: 10
-PenaltyReturnTypeOnItsOwnLine: 300
-
 # Don't sort #include's
 SortIncludes: false