splitToList should return ImmutableList

I find myself constantly writing things like this:

ImmutableList<String> parts = ImmutableList.copyOf(Splitter.on("/").split(path));

I’d like to use splitToList but it doesn’t return an immutable list.

I was wondering how the Guava team justifies this method returning a mutable list. What’s the use case for this list being mutable?

[hakanai]

(Or as a good enough second option, can we at least get splitToImmutableList as an alternative?)

[hakanai]

I’m afraid I’ll probably be making a BetterSplitter class which just has the method return the right list type in the first place and banning use of Guava’s one in our codebase.