Re: Convention for new “guix style“?

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello from 2022!

I missed the bikeshedding discussion last year.  :-)

I think we can tweak style as we go, and it’s okay to have variants
around the same style IMO, but I’m against the idea of rewriting the
whole repo every time we have a new idea of what things should look
like.  This one was very much one-shot.

When doing the first iterations of ‘guix style’¹, I found it more
pleasant to the eye to have small lists on a single line, the prime
example being:

  (native-inputs
    (list autoconf automake libtool pkg-config))

Diffs of such a list remain readable IMO.  I do agree that for longer
lists one item per line is clearer though, which is why the pretty
printer has this #:long-list parameter, currently defaulting to 5.

There’s an opportunity to discuss style with new ‘guix style’ changes².
However, care must be taken not to fall into the bikeshedding trap.  I
think we must aim for readability and consistency, but also acknowledge
that there’ll always be circumstances where one might choose a slightly
different stylistic variant and that up to a certain level those
variants are entirely fine.  In the end ‘guix style’ is a helper; human
beings get the last say.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/49169
² https://issues.guix.gnu.org/52974