How to add completion: variant of "make" command

How to add completion: variant of "make" command

[Kai Grossjohann]

I would like to configure zsh to support completion of make targets,
in the following setup.  I have no idea how to go about this: Where to
start reading docs, for instance.

* Our Makefiles depend on the environment because they contain
  "include $(FOO)" where FOO comes from the environment.

* I have a shell script, say "xmake", that

  - searches for a project root directory amongst the ancestors of the
    current directory, then
  - changes into that directory (if found),
  - then sources a file ENV from that directory (if it exists), and
    finally
  - invokes regular "make".

  (The shell script also prints GNU-style "Entering directory `foo'"
  and "Leaving directory `foo'" messages to enable Emacs to parse the
  error messages.)

So how do I make a variant of "make" completion that does what the
shell script does before it invokes regular "make" completion?

Thanks,
Kai

Re: How to add completion: variant of "make" command

[Peter Stephenson]

Kai Grossjohann wrote:
> So how do I make a variant of "make" completion that does what the
> shell script does before it invokes regular "make" completion?

You need to write your own make replacement and tell the shell to use
that.  Say it's called _make_with_xmake, then

  autoload -U _make_with_xmake
  compdef _make_with_xmake make

will do the trick.  If it's in the function path before _make and
contains the #compdef line below you shouldn't need to bother.

_make_with_xmake will probably look something like:


#compdef make

if <...test whether we want to do the xmake stuff...>; then
  <...do the xmake stuff...>
fi

_make "$@"


As long as it ends up with a call to the normal _make you can add
any preprocessing you like.  If you don't want to complete anything
special, you're pretty well insulated from the details of the
completion system.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


To access the latest news from CSR copy this link into a web browser:  http://www.csr.com/email_sig.php

To get further information regarding CSR, please visit our Investor Relations page at http://ir.csr.com/csr/about/overview

Re: How to add completion: variant of "make" command

[Kai Grossjohann]

Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com> writes:

> Kai Grossjohann wrote:
>> So how do I make a variant of "make" completion that does what the
>> shell script does before it invokes regular "make" completion?
>
> You need to write your own make replacement and tell the shell to
> use that.[...] As long as it ends up with a call to the normal _make
> you can add any preprocessing you like.

Cool.  I ended up with the following in my ~/.zshrc:

_xmake () {
    if [ -r ./ENV ]; then
        . ./ENV
    fi
    _make "$@"
}
compdef _xmake xmake

It seemed to be too small to put it anywhere else :-)  Amazingly
enough, I already had a function and a compdef call; I just hadn't
thought that I could just call the existing function _make...  D'oh.

Thanks a lot!

Kai