Re: Git completion - contributing to git.git

["Štěpán Němec" <stepnem@gmail.com>]

Simon Ruderich <simon@ruderich.org> writes:

> On Sun, Jul 04, 2010 at 10:45:13AM +0200, Štěpán Němec wrote:
>>>> I’d rather not, to be honest.  It’s always a pain to have two files,
>>>> as they can become out of sync when patches are sent to one repository
>>>> and not the other, users don’t know which version to use, and so on.
>>>
>>> +1
>>>
>>> There's nothing special about Git either.  What of the other 500 odd
>>> completion functions and 'associated' projects?
>>
>> What's special about Git is that new options are added and various
>> tweaks done _very_ often. The Zsh Git completion, apart from being
>> buggy/unfinished (some of the problems were fixed recently), is also
>> out of sync, because nobody really follows Git development and updates
>> it accordingly.
>
> I'm not very actively following Git's development (always running
> latest release though), but I don't think that's the case for the
> "normal" user. I consider myself an intermediate/advanced git
> user and use _git from the current zsh CVS checkout and I've
> never felt _git was missing something important (sometimes file
> completion could be even smarter - and maybe faster, but it's
> already very good). Sometimes one option or another is missing,
> but I don't think that's a big problem as I can just add it (or
> ignore it, as I don't need all of git's options anyway).

I didn't mean to imply _git was not "good enough". Obviously it is
sufficient for the people that are using it, otherwise there would be
much more work being done on it than currently is. But that doesn't mean
it can't and shouldn't be improved.

>> The only problem I see is whether there are really enough Zsh users
>> following Git development and at the same time able and willing to
>> maintain the completion script.
>
> I don't see the difference between maintaining the _git file in
> zsh's CVS or in git's git repository regarding the speed of
> development of _git.
>
> If an active git developer (or anybody else) wants to update it
> in zsh's CVS he only needs to send the patches here and they are
> applied quickly.

Maybe. I've seen some _git patches lying on this list for several weeks
before being applied, but recently that seems to be an exception. So
yeah, if someone from the Git side gets more involved and sends patches
every now and then and they get applied in reasonable time, there might
be no difference.

> The only difference is, as others have already mentioned, that
> maintaining a file in two places is a very bad thing. And as user
> I have to look in many different places (and I even have to know
> that the completion exists) to get my completion functions.
> That's not a very good idea.

AIUI the "maintaining a file in two places" idea was conditioned by some
kind of synchronization scheme, i.e. you could use either of the versions,
because they would just be the same most of the time.

Failing that, it seems to me (having been following both zsh-workers and
the Git list for some time) that having _git in Git (given there are
people who'd work on it, see my previous mail), and possibly just using
this list for getting advice when they're stuck or want to discuss
something with more Zsh users, might be more effective, esp. on the
synchronization front (the Bash completion changes often get committed
immediately after the corresponding Git feature is added).

> IMHO moving _git to git's repository only increase the work in
> maintaining it, sometimes which could be spend much better in
> improving it.

I don't see how it would increase the work.

Štěpán