[mr] bash-completion rules

[Antonio Ospite]

On Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:58:18 +0000
Adam Spiers <vcs-home at adamspiers.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Antonio Ospite
> <ospite at studenti.unina.it> wrote:
> > On Wed, 7 Dec 2011 17:11:52 +0100
> > Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
[...]
> >>
> >> For zsh, it's
> >>
> >>   /usr/share/zsh/functions/Completion/Unix/_mr
> >>
> >> but just send it to zsh-workers at zsh.org once done.
> >
> > That's a good point, maybe I too will just send the bash rules to the
> > bash-completion project instead of having them in 'mr'.
> 
> Personally I always thought that was the wrong approach, because
> completion rules are necessarily coupled to functionality, e.g. if mr
> learns a new option `--foo' then the completion rules need to learn it
> at the same time.  Therefore it makes sense for the completion rules
> to live in the same repository as the program, and to be installed at
> the same time the program is installed.
>

I obviously agree on that, in theory :)
That's why I asked here first.

> Unfortunately, in practice this isn't perfect, because (a) a program's
> upstream maintainer(s) and its completion rule maintainer(s) are often
> not the same people (e.g. the maintainer of program X may not ever use
> bash/zsh) and (b) there is no official standard on where an
> installation should drop a new completion function.
>

The cost of (a) is, for example, that bash-completion rules are going to
be copied to the filesystem even if bash itself isn't installed at all.
FWIW I think I could live with some zsh-related files on my system even
if I don't use zsh.

> Therefore in practice, it's up to the distribution packagers to get
> this right, but their job is made a lot easier if the upstream tarball
> contains the completion functions, and all they have to do is ensure
> that the rpm/deb/whatever places that file in the correct location,
> which ideally would override the completion function shipped with the
> shell.
>
> So my recommendation would be: ship completion rules with mr, but also
> submit them to the shell project.
> 

I'd really like to avoid duplication, I am willing to update mr bash
completion rules when needed, but I definitely don't want to communicate
those changes twice, it's a waste of time.

I'd say it's up to the author of mr to decide whether he wants to keep
this stuff into his codebase or not. Joey?

Thanks,
   Antonio

-- 
Antonio Ospite
http://ao2.it

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.madduck.net/pipermail/vcs-home/attachments/20111217/5a08d696/attachment.pgp>