Nushell core team meeting 2022-09-28

Attendees

• Storm, JT, Darren, Reilly, sholderbach

Agenda

• News from the 0.69 release - (darren) related to release - testing failures for things like touch -t -d that got rolled back. How can we get away from doing a release and then immediately doing a hotfix?
• Status report: Grammar experimentation. What's next?
• Do we want to open the grammar work to a wider audience?
• Engine interactions with external commands (https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6594) also https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/6584
• ? Completions

Discussed Topics

0.69 release

Maybe a problem with NZ UTC +13 time
Notified by archlinux build -> quick response thanks to JT (we are unfortunately on 0.69.1)
Reilly: maybe we should overhaul the time code to use UTC internally (currently does most things in local time zone)

Let's have a release checklist

T - ? days

• checked the state of other dependencies (e.g. crossterm, nu-ansi-term, tabled)

T - 1 day

• Reedline is released
• Blog post is ready
• Version bump PR ready to go

Release day

• press the release nu button (maybe include cargo publish --dry-run to check dependency tree problems)
• publish blogpost and land docs PRs for new features
• Social media
• Version bump PR to identify post launch changes

Completions

Several issues are complaining about annoying quality of life problems

Reedline integration via menu is gnarly -> goal refactor to make it clearer and less of an implicit state machine

Also clarify responsibilities on the nushell side (draw out a hierarchy of what contributes suggestions in what order)

-> suggestion have an announced meeting on discord to lure in the interested contributors

Interaction with external commands

Several issues when capturing stdout or stderr (unbounded/bounded channel switch back and forward seems to be a non solution as we had to revert that. there may be deadlocks)
Also unix process hierarchy (caused issues on mac before, new PR by unrelentingtech needs testing/signoff, suggestion stefan: land the PR early in the bleeding edge period)

-> Tag the people with experience and knowledge in a meta tracking issues to maybe streamline the efforts and collect info about the OSes

Grammar

Currently hodgepodge of current state and our desires

JT gradually introduce the new ideas as experimental features (e.g. call syntax) with a flag

Match syntax from the community would be great (seems to be nicer to implement with a simplified syntax, ITS A MATCH)

Q: how to do error recovery and completions with the pest derived parser?

Good contact: Ask CAD97 on details on pest for error continuation as they seem to be the currently most active pest contributor (username on discord: CAD#8720)

Even if it doesn't work out with pest right now it seems mature enough to offer a experimental branch to explore syntax evolution with actual results.