rsync completions

rsync completions

[Alan Orth]

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Dear zsh-workers,

A few months ago the zsh completions for rsync stopped working correctly.
Tab completion of remote paths currently triple escapes special characters,
for example:

$ rsync -av 1.2.3.4:/home/me/downloads/Some\\\ File\\\ With\\\ Spaces ~/

This now results in an error, ie:

rsync: link_stat "/home/me/downloads/Some\ File\ With\ Spaces" failed:
No such file or directory (2)

I have to manually correct the triple escapes to use a single escape like
this for it to work:

$ rsync -av 1.2.3.4:/home/me/downloads/Some\ File\ With\ Spaces ~/

After some research I found that rsync 3.2.4 introduced changes to argument
parsing behavior¹ on 2022-04-15. This was patched by the fish shell²
recently shortly after the rsync 3.2.4 release.

Apologies if the zsh-workers is not the correct place to post this. I would
appreciate any advice or assistance on this, for example if it's a
distribution issue I will gladly file an issue elsewhere. I'm on Arch Linux
with zsh 5.9 and rsync 3.2.5.

Thank you!

¹ https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.2.4
² https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/8895

-- 
Alan Orth
alan.orth@gmail.com
https://picturingjordan.com
https://englishbulgaria.net
https://mjanja.ch

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Re: rsync completions

[Bart Schaefer]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 11:08 AM Alan Orth <alan.orth@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A few months ago the zsh completions for rsync stopped working correctly.

So if this is a problem introduced by those quoting changes in rsync
3.2.x, then the rsync completion has to become version-aware, which I
see is what fish has done.

I'm not able to tell what ramifications this has when the remote
version differs significantly from the local version; it doesn't
appear fish is taking that into account, so perhaps it doesn't matter.

A quick workaround for you, Alan, is likely to be
alias rsync='rsync --old-args'

There might even be a clever way to insert --old-args into $BUFFER
only when completion has been invoked, but completion widgets don't
play well with "ordinary" line edits so I'm not going there just now.

Re: rsync completions

[Mikael Magnusson]

On 8/19/22, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 11:08 AM Alan Orth <alan.orth@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> A few months ago the zsh completions for rsync stopped working correctly.
>
> So if this is a problem introduced by those quoting changes in rsync
> 3.2.x, then the rsync completion has to become version-aware, which I
> see is what fish has done.

From what I can tell from
https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.2.4 the change is
specifically in 3.2.4 which seems extremely user unfriendly to
introduce such a breaking change in a micro revision.

> I'm not able to tell what ramifications this has when the remote
> version differs significantly from the local version; it doesn't
> appear fish is taking that into account, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
>
> A quick workaround for you, Alan, is likely to be
> alias rsync='rsync --old-args'
>
> There might even be a clever way to insert --old-args into $BUFFER
> only when completion has been invoked, but completion widgets don't
> play well with "ordinary" line edits so I'm not going there just now.

-- 
Mikael Magnusson

Re: rsync completions

[Alan Orth]

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Hey Mikael and Bart,

Thanks for the suggestion on a shell alias with `--old-args`. I tried
`export RSYNC_OLD_ARGS=1` and it works as well. You are right that this is
an unfortunate change for a minor point release. Not sure what zsh should
do here. At least now there's some kind of record so users who are having
this issue know what's happening.

Regards,

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