Documentation: How long is "one line"?

[chris-martin]

Apologies for opening up an annoying bikeshed issue here, but I hope this will be a quick question: What do we consider the ideal maximum line length to be for Nix code in this repo? I ask because there are a couple places in the manual that seem to imply that somebody has a line length in mind:

1. The doc for the description field to mkDerivation:

   A short (one-line) description of the package.

2. There's a place in the style guide that says:

   if they don't fit on one line

As a contributor, I don't care what it is, I just want to make people happy, so can we write that number down somewhere? I'll be glad to PR the docs.

[rnhmjoj]

I don't think there is an official line length.
In that case I propose the standard 80 characters per lines. You can easily fit multiples files in a single screen and generally longer lines can be refactored in a cleaner way.

[1pakch]

I asked myself the same question and would prefer if there was an official position on that (or a style guide in general).

Personally, I like 80 too. Urls are often longer and I don't know a good workaround. Do you?

[7c6f434c]

I wonder if «one-line description» is supposed to be shorter than a line of code…

Personally, I feel like letting URLs wrap around the line end is the lesser annoyance.

[Ekleog]

(triage) I guess this would be better opened as a RFC, this way bikeshedding can occur in public at an easily-to-access place; while here the issue is just going to be lost to all except people ping-ed by codetriage :)

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