support passing NODE_PATH as list

[SteffenDE]

No description provided.

[josevalim]

I think we should normalize all entries that are lists, not only NODE_PATH. WDYT?

[SteffenDE]

I'm not sure, since this separator seems to be specific to PATH-like variables. Claude says:

Q: I'm adding a feature to an Elixir library to pass a list of strings to a CLI program's ENV variable NODE_PATH. It joins strings with ":" on unix and ";" on Windows. Is it reasonable to apply this joining to all environment variables configured as a list?

It's not reasonable to apply this joining logic to all list environment variables by default. Here's why:

Path-specific Convention

The colon/semicolon delimiter pattern is specifically for PATH-like variables:

• PATH
• NODE_PATH
• PYTHONPATH
• CLASSPATH
• LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  These all represent filesystem paths and follow the OS-specific path separator convention.

Other List Formats Exist

Many environment variables use different delimiters:

• Comma-separated: SOME_FLAGS=opt1,opt2,opt3
• Space-separated: CFLAGS=-O2 -Wall -Wextra
• Custom delimiters: DATABASE_URLS=postgres://host1|postgres://host2
• No delimiter (concatenated): Some variables expect values without separators

[SteffenDE]

I've been thinking that maybe instead of applying this to env: %{"NODE_PATH" => ...}, we could also just add a config

config :esbuild,
  profile: [
    ...,
    node_paths: []
  ]

and set NODE_PATH internally?

[josevalim]

I'm not sure, since this separator seems to be specific to PATH-like variables.

Exactly, but we can assume that anything given as a list is meant to be a PATH-like variable.

We could also set a special :node_path profile... but it comes with some downsides in that, if someone reads esbuild official docs, now they need to know there is special profile option and what it means.

[SteffenDE]

🙌🏻