[jboss-as7-dev] order of import statements

[David M. Lloyd]

On 10/09/2012 11:55 AM, Jeff Mesnil wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is there an agreement on the order of import statements in our codebase?
>
> I'm using eclipse which, by default, organize imports in the following order:
>
> static
>
> java
> javax
> org
> com
>
> but we have some files with a different order *cough*intellij*cough* :)
> That makes for some noise in the commits when I modify a class and eclipse changes the imports order.
>
> If we agree with this default order, I can add a checkstyle rule[1] for this.

We tried this before but it didn't work out because checkstyle gets 
confused about imports which are only used in Javadoc, and because 
regardless of checkstyle rules everyone cannot agree on an order, and 
anyway changes to existing code should NEVER EVER EVER EVER include 
import "cleanups", "reorgs", or anything of the sort (no matter how bad 
you think it is) along with "real" changes because it just obscures what 
has changed and causes trouble.  The same goes for whitespace fixes.  If 
a file is very offensively formatted, I could see considering a 
specific, dedicated commit whose sole purpose and content is to clean up 
the whitespace (i.e. absolutely no functional changes), but other than 
that... no.

For new code I can't imagine it really matters as long as you don't use 
star imports (though using star with static import for certain classes 
is just fine).
-- 
- DML