It should be possible to run the formatters without needing to install all P4C dependencies

[fruffy]

Currently CMake breaks if you do not have certain dependencies (flex, bison, boost, etc) installed. It would be nice to run our formatters independently.

[zhonniks]

Hello, I am going to working on this issue

[zhonniks]

@fruffy if i want to extract formatters into a separate directory or module, may i add only clang-format and cmake-format scripts ? It is a bit complicated to find all used formatters, directory will include documentation how to use it is it okay?

[fruffy]

This should be possible to do only in CMake. The reason why is that each back end may add its own clang-format files. We used to have code set up like this but it turned out to be too inflexible.

We have a linter file where everything is set up: https://github.com/p4lang/p4c/blob/71d79c8dccd9fc78af52379868f20f5c45e69774/cmake/Linters.cmake#L1

Private extensions may call add_clang_format_files to add their own files to the list.

[fruffy]

Also do not worry about creating a dedicated folder structure. We already have all the formatters and configs available, the only changes required are to the CMake script. We could add an option "CMAKE_LINT_ONLY" to the main CMakeLists.txt file where it does not check for certain dependencies.

[zhonniks]

added PR #4552 should i add conditional checks? In order to handle the dependencies based on whether CMAKE_LINT_ONLY is enabled or not: if(NOT CMAKE_LINT_ONLY) find_package(FLEX REQUIRED) find_package(BISON REQUIRED) find_package(Boost REQUIRED) endif()

or an option "CMAKE_LINT_ONLY" is enough?

But it looks like the failures are coming from eBPF back end tests, is it because some dependencies are missing?