Thanks for bringing this up. I think this is related to issue #2539 by @fchapoton who has been looking into this in the past.

#2539 discusses using the linting feature of Ruff. I'm talking using the code formatting feature.

True! Ruff has been used in previous PRs to format code, e.g. #1922, #1902, #1903, #2108 (which was closed).

True! Ruff has been used in previous PRs to format code, e.g. #1922, #1902, #1903, #2108 (which was closed).

Those PRs are using the linting feature of ruff, which is the ruff check command. I'm talking using the format feature, which is the ruff format command.

The downside is that formatting the entire code base would create a huge diff and mess up git blame.

The downsides shouldn't be a real issue, one can just add the commit that does the formatting to a .git-blame-ignore-revs file. As an example, SciPy does it like this.

I'm generally against using a code formatter for this project. This can give developers more freedom and encourage them to focus on the scientific and physics aspects, than on formatting and style.