Re: bash-2.04 programmable completion

[Sven Wischnowsky <wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de>]

Falk Hueffner wrote:

> Sven Wischnowsky <wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de> writes:
> 
> > Just found this:
> > 
> > > From: chet@nike.ins.cwru.edu (Chet Ramey)
> > > Subject: Bash-2.04 Programmable Completion message 4
> > > Date: 05 Nov 1999 00:00:00 GMT
> > > Message-ID: <991105173103.AA78566.SM@nike.ins.cwru.edu>
> > [...]
> > Two builtins `complete' and `compgen' with almost the same options,
> > functions starting with underscore, -[PS] options, COMPREPLY, arrays
> > holding names of stopped jobs and functions, etc.
> > 
> > `compgen' is lightly different from what was our `compgen', it
> > obviously just outputs the possible matches. But then -- the name.
> 
> I think it would be BAD if bash had a similar system to zsh. It would
> create confusion and increase work if one would want to use the same
> completion scripts for both shells. So we should really try to have at
> least a common base. I don't know if the two systems could be totally
> compatible, since probably bash doesn't implement some needed features
> like assiocative arrays. If this is impossible, the bash system should
> at least not look similar.
> 
> Could probably some competent person contact the bash maintainers on
> this topic?

Well... they may have read your mail already. (I got a mail from Chet
Ramey where he answered my `Are we being monitored?' with `Of course. 
Great programmers steal good ideas wherever possible.')

I don't think we can make anyone do anything just because their
completion interface looks too much like ours. And, in fact, it only
looks like a mixture of compctl and compgen. The former is what I
would like to call deprecated and the latter is already dead.

And as long as bash doesn't have all those spiffy utility functions we 
have, I don't think we'll be able to interchange completion functions. 
What might be possible (and this is more interesting for us anyway) is 
to hack something that allows us to use bash-completion functions. This
also allows me to mention again that I would like to have a shell
function named `compctl' that defines functions for the completion
system -- as the last step before removing the compctl module.
Something like this function (two of them, named `complete' and
`compgen') together with some wrapper function used to call bash-
completion-functions should probably be enough to use these functions
and help users to migrate from bash to zsh.
For several of the functions/commands this won't be needed, though,
because we have our own functions for that.

Bye
 Sven


--
Sven Wischnowsky                         wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de