This is a pretty rare case. For rare cases you can use an ignore hint.

I've just hit the same problem 🙂 (adding one custom, global listener to the awt event dispatcher)

Like I said:

#_{:clj-kondo/ignore [:unused-private-var]}
(defonce ^:private dude 42)

so you like kondo to warn when in doubt?

for me it’s the opposite

in this case clj-kondo cannot read your mind why you are using defonce, it can be argued both ways

but for these cases you’d like to err on the side of warnings?

No worries! Just wanted to share that case can be more common than you think.

Why are you even creating a var when all you want is some piece of code to be executed once. I think it's just evidence of an edge case of an edge case. Automatically deciding no not warn here is too opinionated. This is exactly why we have ignore hints.

I guess we want different things from kondo

fine

if you want kondo to warn when in doubt I’ll know not to bring up things like this in the future

This is not in general the case, I'm only talking about this specific case

I don't find the evidence to change the current behavior compelling enough, I can see cases where it would work against you

Might change in the future though

hmm, work against you = some dead code at worst?

how would you write setup code that should only be executed once?

need some state to store that it ran already

> hmm, work against you = some dead code at worst? exactly, clj-kondo first and foremost is a tool to keep your code clean and minimal, hence the name :) I've used defonce myself in this way but it's not the only way people use defonce. I think not warning would go against the name of the tool ;)

so just use the ignore hint is the current advice. we could introduce some convention for unused vars that start with an underscore, but this is pretty rare, in the sense that, it has never come up before. I'd be open to that option though

makes sense now that you spell it out like this

I’m less interested in clean & tidy code but want things to not explode

I think it's easier to make a mess than to keep things tidy, clj-kondo errs on the side of the latter

also I didn't have my coffee yet and I was a bit grumpy, sorry for that

didn’t get that feeling here, all good! Enjoy your ☕ !

(defonce ^:private _foo ...)

yeah, guess it would go well together with the handling of fn unused args

ok, I'll add that

done: https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo/commit/d539034340fa046b139ac3268b43287a34e974fb

excellent, thank you!

OK; thank you!