Nushell core team meeting 2023-01-04

Attendees

• Darren
• Michael
• Andres
• Reilly
• Stefan

Agenda

• Happy new year!
• get/select/cellpath semantics
• PATH variables and ENV_CONVERSIONS
• nu! tests and friends
  • spins up a new nu process
  • currently with the default_env.nu
    • performance concerns highlighted by Reilly's profiling
  • strips all new lines at the moment
    • Pro: Makes tests platform independent
    • Con: unable to catch corner-cases and test faithful output
  • still confusing how many options are there to test small things (Is nu! the right thing for smaller tests not interacting with a full test fixture?)

Discussed Topics

Cellpath semantics

Reillys attempt at hole/null-insensitive cell paths https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/7540

.? operator or ? postfix to deal with the error resulting from missing data

Reilly and Webbedspace were bouncing options back and forth

get -i is now not collapsing everything.

weird table chunking

Report on discord

we now check every second if there is new stuff on the External/ListStream and try to display it

ENV_CONVERSIONS and how we deal with path variables

Path is a string on the system we want to expose it as a list/structured nu data.

Goal consistency and no extra distractions for the users
Dealing with paths is very common

Could we move ENV_CONVERSIONS to just a hard coded implementation in rust?

Potential issue: PATH is not the only path listing variable

ENV_CONVERSION has a weird evalutaion order in the sequence of nu config scripts

Testing

nu! macro is a challenging place to work on
Invokes nu as an executable
Parses options through macro_rules! (Andres remembers working on a more configurable setup)

Problems with nu!:

• strips newlines
• configuration (takes time)
• ANSI coloring (could be addressed by config)
  • Webbedspace added an option to override the whole config in https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/7650
• Contaminates plugin registration

Through legacy we have a confusing state of different test locations and approaches.

Plugins

Andres is trying to make his plugin creation library to the current state of the nu-plugin interface

Would be great to have powerful templates to start working on plugins in python, Ruby etc.

Darren's template for Rust

PR's

Waiting for parser experts