This has been bugging me for a while, but I’ve never gotten around to writing something coherent about it. So I’ll just put the idea here since I’m curious if the community agrees.
I don’t like lib.optional. I think its highly counterintuitive that it wraps the result in a list. Here’s an example of an abuse: Merge pull request #80206 from Thra11/guile-gnutls · NixOS/nixpkgs@bbb8132 · GitHub
Can’t we just use lib.optionals instead? Yes, it requires two additional characters ([]) but I think that is well worth the clarity.
15 Likes
generally I use optionals + [ ], even for single elements, just to avoid this scenario. Also makes adding new elements easier on the diffs.
5 Likes
I like the idea.
Btw, stats:
$ rg "optional " | wc -l
4576
$ rg "optionals " | wc -l
2460
4 Likes
Personally I prefer optional. It feels “cleaner” and is easier to type. I don’t mind if this becomes policy with enough people agreeing that it’s a good thing though.
What I’m not keen on is people changing this without it being a documented policy, because otherwise we can end up with it being changed back and forth, wasting people’s time and introducing meaningless code churn.
So, people who feel strongly about this: please work on making it a policy (deprecate lib.optional?) before changing it willy-nilly in nixpkgs.
7 Likes