[Bash-completion-devel] RFC: Better long option with argument completion

[David Paleino]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:23:09 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:

> Hello,

Hello Ville,

> Currently completion of long options that take arguments is pretty bad.

Yes, definitely.

> For an example, many completions list things like "--foo=" in their compgen
> -W strings which end up completed as "--foo\= " which is annoying, especially
> the trailing space.  Some completions use "internal" workarounds for this
> which is suboptimal from maintenance point of view.
> 
> With bash 4.x I suppose we could use compopt -o nospace but I suggest doing 
> something about this already now.

Agreed.

> So I came up with the attached patch.  The idea is that for all long options 
> that take an argument and can take it in both "--foo=bar" and "--foo bar" 
> forms, we only list "--foo" (not "--foo=") in completions, run it through 
> _split_longopt, and code the completion logic as if "--foo bar" had been 
> passed and it'll work for both "--foo=bar" and "--foo bar".

The patch looks good to me, just one *curiosity* (i.e. only curiosity, nothing
to fix :P): why are you quoting

+		prev="${cur%%?(\\)=*}"
+		cur="${cur#*=}"

? I'm in favour of *always* quoting things, just to be safe, but was just
curious if there was a specific reason here. I never found a longopt with
embedded space :)

> Additionally, using the return value of _split_longopt we can "return 0"
> early to avoid doing potentially weird/slow things with last resort default 
> completions later when a --foo=bar thing is being completed and we don't have 
> specific completions for the required argument for --foo (the assumption
> being that if --foo= is specified, --foo requires an argument).

Good, that would speed up things a bit.

> The attached patch contains _split_longopt and a few modifications to
> existing completions to illustrate its usage and how it helps and what kind
> of cleanups and improved features it allows.
> 
> Comments?  I would like to commit _split_longopt soon and start changing 
> existing completions to use it.

I'm fully in favour of it.

As soon as you'll commit the patch (if there are no other objections), I'll
start fixing completions too. :)


Thank you for your work,
David

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