A question about a truthiness check in awesome/lib/wibox/widget/base.lua

[internet-account2]

Maybe this is just a stupid question but I can't resist asking: Why does this line check widgets?

https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/blame/691e36425a645e54402cb04efc4c2b00d73051bd/lib/wibox/widget/base.lua#L770

    if widgets and max > 0 then

widgets comes from parse_table, which always returns a table, because it either returns a table that function created itself, or a table it gets from gears.table.from_sparse, which itself always returns a table.

So that line reads to me as

    if true and max > 0 then

(Also, if max is greater than 0, then widgets should definitely be not nil?..)

Is it written that way to be "future-proof", so in case any code might get changed so that widgets could potentially become nil it already covers that case?

Or is there ever any chance that widgets in this case could ever be nil that I'm missing (while simultaneously max > 0)?

The only reason I stumbled upon this line is because I got bitten by a bug that got fixed ~4 years ago because I'm still on the "stable" 4.3 version from the arch repo (shame on me I guess) so I was questioning my sanity for the last few hours 🫠 ( 7bc3ec4 )

(Also the commit comment of that fix is strictly speaking false ("drill will be called twice"), because the wrapping function doesn't have to use the declarative way. Not that it really matters, just another small nitpick ^^)