Is there a way we could get sbt or a sbt plugin to sort the imports how we want?

[pjfanning]

• we want to maintain custom sorting in many of the scala files used for documentation - so if we could annotate the files that we don't want to sort automatically or exclude the docs directory, that would be ideal
• we tend to import org.apache.pekko so that we can save on the org.apache part when importing Pekko classes - so a sort tool that can handle that would be great - I am not wedded to maintaining this if it makes life easier to the tooling although I suspect that some people like them
• we waste a lot of time hand sorting imports and commenting on PRs asking for changes to imports

In this repo, we have sbt sortImports - an alias setup to call scalafix commands. The output seems good but some how we don't use it.

[ptrdom]

we tend to import org.apache.pekko so that we can save on the org.apache part when importing Pekko classes

It looks like https://scalacenter.github.io/scalafix/docs/rules/OrganizeImports.html#groups should support this. Either way we can use scalafix OrganizeImports rule, just either need to try to config the grouping as we want or get rid of the grouping. I personally prefer ungrouped, exploded imports, because those are easy to be made to work in both scalafix and IDEs

[He-Pin]

Lianchen has a rule

[mdedetrich]

It doesn't, see scalacenter/scalafix#2100

[He-Pin]

We can add some thing format on format off

[pjfanning]

sbt sortInports is a set up as a command alias in this repo and it has a .scalafix.conf that excludes the docs and jdocs packages.

[He-Pin]

I still remember I added that years ago, I think which actually works well, the doc of imports can be teweak anyway, but, that task will always give all a consistency result

[mdedetrich]

I already looked into it, there isn't an automated tool that satisfies our requirements, specifically

• scalafix doesn't support nested alias imports i.e. import org.apache.pekko followed up with import pekko... imports. See issue (that I have raised) OrganizeImports.groups not correctly grouping imports if doing a nested import statement scalacenter/scalafix#2100
• Even if previous point is fixed, the biggest issue is our docs with paradox. You may have noticed that in the docs project, we have duplicated imports and this is intentional, its because we have paradox code snippets in multiple places i.e. // #some snippet. There is also an issue on this, see Add concept of doc-generation-directives scalacenter/scalafix#1793.

Aside from these problems, scalafix can solve all of our issues, there is no other tool that can sort imports the way we want (I already tried it in pekko some time ago)

[mdedetrich]

what about https://scalameta.org/scalafmt/docs/configuration.html#imports-groups

I think I have tried it a long while ago, but cannot remember if it had any issues or not. Often developers want to both sort imports and remove unused, and latter cannot be done by scalafmt, but scalafix with OrganizeImports can do both.

Scalafmt cannot do anything regarding import ordering/grouping because it's possible to break behaviour since Scala is import ordering sensitive.

It needs to be done in scalafix as only scalafix can calculate effects of import changes as it has compile time information.

[kitbellew]

Scalafmt cannot do anything regarding import ordering/grouping because it's possible to break behaviour since Scala is import ordering sensitive.

if using relative imports without careful grouping, that's correct. if groups are configured with FDQN prefixes such as com, org.apache and one of these domain prefixes is not used in the middle (i.e., org.apache.xxx.yyy.org.apache.zzz), then scalafmt will group and sort within these groups and put the rest after them.

[raboof]

I see #2229 already excludes the 'docs' project, so that might be fine?

I must admit I don't entirely understand the nuance of scalacenter/scalafix#2100 - are we actually impacted by it? #2229 looks kinda fine to me?

[pjfanning]

I found an example in pekko-http that is affected.

import org.apache.pekko
import pekko.http.scaladsl.model._
import MediaTypes._

The scalafix sortImports doesn't treat import MediaTypes._ as needing to be sorted under import pekko.http.scaladsl.model._

It is not that common. I fixed the issue in my peko-http PR by modifying such imports to something like import pekko.http.scaladsl.model.MediaTypes._. A one-off change that keeps the import sorting happy going forward.

[He-Pin]

yes, but after we tweak that, it's stable.

[He-Pin]

If we want more contributors, I think we need to simplify the process and make everything as automated and tool-based as possible, rather than manually adjusting things. Everyone's local settings may be different, and without a tool to guarantee that everything is set up correctly, problems are very likely to occur. It's time-consuming and labor-intensive, and no one wants to mess around with it.

[mdedetrich]

If we want more contributors, I think we need to simplify the process and make everything as automated and tool-based as possible, rather than manually adjusting things. Everyone's local settings may be different, and without a tool to guarantee that everything is set up correctly, problems are very likely to occur. It's time-consuming and labor-intensive, and no one wants to mess around with it.

To be clear, the intention behind my PR was to do it once and only once, it wasn't to create some process to force manual sorting on users.

The idea was to have something until we could use scalafix because there was some breaking issues that I experienced when I tried it out (remember that the current scalafix config was added years ago by Akka team but they never used it because of said issues)

[He-Pin]

And there is https://scalameta.org/scalafmt/docs/configuration.html#imports-groups now, but I never tested that.

@kitbellew can scalafmt help, thanks

[He-Pin]

@mdedetrich The did a sort imports recently.

[He-Pin]

refs: scalameta/scalafmt#4977

[He-Pin]

refs: https://scalacenter.github.io/scalafix/docs/rules/OrganizeImports.html

[pjfanning]

I tried that out in pekko-http.
It is much slower than sbt-imports because it compiles all the code.
I haven't yet found a config that deals well with the sorting the imports well with the import org.apache.pekko.

I'll happily defer to someone else who can get it work well. I have to move on to the 1.2.1 release and other stuff.

[He-Pin]

Yes, I think the current one is quite ok in most cases.

[mdedetrich]

I tried that out in pekko-http.

It is much slower than sbt-imports because it compiles all the code.

I haven't yet found a config that deals well with the sorting the imports well with the import org.apache.pekko.

I'll happily defer to someone else who can get it work well. I have to move on to the 1.2.1 release and other stuff.

So to do proper import sorting you have to compile the code because in Scala, import order can effect behaviour of code and so you need to compile in order to make sure you don't break behaviour.

You experienced the same issues that I did in the past, shall we talk about this in the discussion thread?