devcontainer clang-format version should match RAPIDS pre-commit requirements

[harrism]

Currently just about every time I push to CI my PRs fail clang-format checks because the clang-format in the devcontainer (cuSpatial) is v16, and RAPIDS pre-commit uses something like v11. Small things like bracket wrapping and comment alignment have changed between versions.

Would be nice for these to align.

[miscco]

I just installed clang-format-17 in our cccl containers. Maybe that would also be a solution for rapids?

[harrism]

We need to match the version used by CI.

[miscco]

Which one is that, I installed the 17.* as a fixed version, we can any version we want through pip

[jrhemstad]

The problem is that RAPIDS currently uses pre-commit to apply clang-format, which requires you to point at a specific clang-format version: https://github.com/rapidsai/cudf/blob/b390bca5055aaf91ef0e6e9f8eb0f6f25cce94d0/.pre-commit-config.yaml#L65C15-L71

You can't just rely on whatever clang-format version happens to be in the container.

[miscco]

You can specify the exact version installed, which is the exact point of the devcontainer. To create a hermetic pre-defined environment.

[jrhemstad]

The point is you'd have to manually sync the version specified in the pre-commit config and the devcontainer definition. There's no way to automatically have one just use the other.

[miscco]

From my point of view a devcontainer needs to be independent. The moment I require a user to install additional tools that have an additional non-obvious dependency on the configuration of the devcontainer, then the whole idea of a devcontainer is broken.

[harrism]

The point is you'd have to manually sync the version specified in the pre-commit config and the devcontainer definition. There's no way to automatically have one just use the other.

Can't we use rapids-dependency-file-generator for this?