Re: [RFC] Cosmetic changes to define-configuration usage

[Bruno Victal <mirai@makinata.eu>]

On 2023-03-31 15:46, Maxim Cournoyer wrote:> I have some apprehension that if we start adding white space between the
> fields here, we'll soon have people adding white space to many other
> places (for consistency or other reasons), which I wouldn't welcome (I
> value compactness, and since in Scheme a single newline is used to
> delimit things at the top level, too much of white space can make things
> less readable in my opinion).

I don't think it needs to be an all-or-nothing situation,
the spacing rules can be always applied selectively “when it makes sense”.

I think spaces between fields is consistent with the general way of things,
for instance, throughout Guix, sections that are only scheme code often do
have some spaces here and there that were added without any adherence to some
rigid criteria but the programmer found it to be an adequate point to 
partition the logic.

The same reasoning applies here, the logic partitioning is done per field instead.
Objectively, there's also a small quantitative difference that's not commonly
present in the rest of the codebase. define-configuration handles both code and documentation,
or putting it another way, it intersperses code and (rather long) strings. The result
is that it's particularly information-dense compared to any other part of the guix codebase.


My 2¢!


Cheers,
Bruno