Nushell core team meeting 2025-02-19

Attendees

• Rose
• Douglas
• Andy
• Piet - Piepmatz (sounds like Pete)
• Jack
• Devyn
• Ian
• Jakub
• Michael
• Auca Coyan
• Stefan
• Antoine
• Renan - Cosineblast
• Darren

Agenda

• CI on beta toolchain
• (low priority) What exactly is a table?
• table command rename
• (low priority) Should all std example results be testable?
• Error signal-noise-ratio –- add to agenda for next week if Darren is not on call
  • IO error subvariants
  • Backtrace

Discussed Topics

Jobs PR (https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/14883)

We're not certain why we're explicitly dropping child process stdin in ForegroundChild::wait
from devyn in Discord:

Probably this is necessary to make sure the child won't be waiting on stdin that it will never get. If stdin was already taken by a pipe operation then dropping it does nothing (it's already gone) but otherwise it would live as long as the other streams (stdout, err)

CI on the beta channel

• Rust project is looking for folks running CI on beta
• Piepmatz's proposal run for the pushes on main to see any regression
  • Concern one: CI budget
    • Should be fine without caching (so not to evict the main CI cache?)
    • IF the run time hurts we can reintroduce caching
  • Concern two: lint noise
    • lints are ahead of our 2-release behind policy. may be unfixable or require #[expect(lint)]
    • just run cargo build or cargo test

What is a table?

• List of records?
• Should each column have values of the same type?
• Are holes allowed?
• Column order in each record shouldn't matter.
  • { a: 1, b: 2 } == { b: 2, a: 1 } => [{ a: 1, b: 2 }] == [{ b: 2, a: 1 }]
• TODO (Douglas accepting): Better document existing definition of strict table in Book and/or Language Guide
• Table should be a subtype of list of records

table command

Proposal: Most of us agree with renaming it to render, but give it extra deprecation period due to frequent usage in config, hooks etc.

• Mechanism for raising soft deprecations for $env.config.table needed
  • Also span bug for the hard errors
• Also a few loose non-grouped config points that possibly should be grouped under useful categories
• Check on startup for $env.config.table (after adding $env.config.render) and also table being used in display_output hook
  • Also possible to implement using OnceCell or similar
• table configs not in $env.config.table
  • footer_mode
  • ls.clickable_links
  • ls.use_ls_colors
  • float_precision