Hi Bryce thanks for your deep inform:
+ astylerc
This config file appears to be for a code formatting tool. I vaguely remember kk discussing it a while back. Is anyone still using it?
The astyle man page indicates it supports using --options=FILENAME to specify a path to astylerc, so the file could be moved to utils/ or elsewhere.
I see we already have the options documented at https://inkscape.org/en/develop/coding-style/ including directions for how to store the settings locally in ~/.astylerc. If no one is actively using this tool, that might be a better solution and remove astylerc from the codebase.
+ _clang-format
I'm not sure why this is in the tree. Guessing it was a jenkins- related thing? I suspect we can drop this.
Is a similar objective than astylerc both need external programs to run maybe we need to select the less intrusibe or the best OS compatibility one