From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 28040 invoked from network); 1 Aug 2001 08:32:31 -0000 Received: from sunsite.dk (130.225.51.30) by ns1.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 1 Aug 2001 08:32:31 -0000 Received: (qmail 28314 invoked by alias); 1 Aug 2001 08:32:20 -0000 Mailing-List: contact zsh-workers-help@sunsite.dk; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk X-No-Archive: yes X-Seq: 15556 Received: (qmail 28295 invoked from network); 1 Aug 2001 08:32:13 -0000 From: Sven Wischnowsky Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 10:31:09 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <200108010831.KAA01554@beta.informatik.hu-berlin.de> To: zsh-workers@sunsite.dk Subject: Re: XML version of completion function In-Reply-To: <1010801073909.ZM324@candle.brasslantern.com> Bart Schaefer wrote: > ... > > Are you really, seriously suggesting that it's worthwhile to expend > 50-70 thousand bytes defining the completion for a single command? > In the case of zip that's 45% larger than the executable; it's even > larger than the executable and its manual page combined. > > In find.xml there are about 5500 bytes of actual data, including the > help text ... the other 89% is XML tags. I'm sorry, I just can't get > excited about this. Well, that's more or less what I expected from using xml ;-) There is a reason behind terse syntaxes like C and _arguments-as-we- know-it after all. But apart from that... some comments: - I actually like being able to add help texts. Peter and I half-heartedly discussed that around the time _complete_help was added. I still don't know where the help texts could be saved and how _complete_help or a similar function could look them up, though. Especially if there are versions in different languages. - I don't understand why is always nested in -- is the latter meant to be an _arguments-arg? If so, see next point. - I think this should be more like describing the command than describing arguments for _arguments. That should also make the things shorter and more readable. But whenever I try to describe how that would look like, I more or less describe _arguments. Hm. - I don't think I'll ever use this format unless someone comes up with a tool that converts a much shorter description to it or that generates most of this automatically. How have you generated this? Typed it in? If so, tell us about your experience with it -- would you like to write completions this way? Bye Sven -- Sven Wischnowsky wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de