Instead of using a pointer why not just have0 mean disabled?

I considered that initially, but I think using the zero value could lead to bugs and/or unintended behaviour. Grey also preferred the semantics ofnil | time.Duration from a FE consumption perspective.

You do have a point, though -- 0 is already an invalid TTL.

Comment: I think the FE or other clients having to know0 means "manual" is unfortunate, but I'm willing to accept it if it's cleaner for our backend/APIs.

As stated earlier, from v2 forwards I believe it's best that we look at the Coder system as a frontend for a backend, not the other way around.

Should we then consider that in the API response? We could return something like{"ttl": 0, "ttl_mode": "manual"}?

It's certainly golang convention to make use of "zero-values" in this way, but I don't think we should extend that to the HTTP API, CLI, or frontend, which should behave in ways that are independent of golang's idioms.

@spikecurtis are you referring to@deansheather 's comment here:#1578 (comment)

why not just have 0 mean disabled?

Or the fact that we're using a pointer such that the value can benil or a number.

Yeah, I feel like among go practitioners, 0 means disabled would be preferred to making it a pointer andnil means disabled.

Comment: I think the FE or other clients having to know0 means "manual" is unfortunate, but I'm willing to accept it if it's cleaner for our backend/APIs.

As stated earlier, from v2 forwards I believe it's best that we look at the Coder system as a frontend for a backend, not the other way around.

Suggestion: Should we implement a custom Duration type liketype NullDuration { Duration time.Duration; Valid bool } (optionally in atypes ornull package) with a customjson.Marshaler? I'm mostly thinking about (Go) consumers here. It's not possible to e.g. do:

req:=UpdateWorkspaceTTLRequest {TTL:&time.Duration(time.Second),}

without first assigning to a variable. Similarly the pointer usage could lead to null pointer dereferences (which arguably would be the "correct" behavior, unless it's known that the zero value is OK).