Re: Yes, another completion question

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, DervishD wrote:

>     The new completion system is more configurable, more powerful,
> etc. but I don't think I need all that configuration and power. In
> fact I prefer the old way, with a dozen compctl commands to make my
> life easier... Am I plainly wrong?

No, not plainly. :-)

"New completion" started out with the noble goal of replacing the rather 
arcane "compctl -x" syntax with the only somewhat less arcane but at least 
more familiar syntax of the shell language.

However, once given a system that could do more powerful things, people 
wanted to take full advantage of it. ("Gosh, if completion can do that, 
couldn't it also do this little bit of extra work too?"  Repeat until the 
"little bit" of extra work done exceeds the original effort.)  The result 
is the current compsys collection of functions.

If you're not one of the people who wants or needs all of those extra 
little bits, there's no reason to use it.  Hence "compcall" and other 
hooks for dropping from one system into the other.  Also hence the use of
autoloading for all the compsys functions, so that even if you enable the
whole thing you only load the bits you actually call upon.

> Is compctl going to dissappear soon and I should not put a minute of 
> work in writing my compctl recipes?

I don't think there's any reason that compctl will disappear -- but it's
unlikely to get any bugfixes or further improvements, either.