[Bash-completion-devel] Improve make target completion

[Tristan Wibberley]

Igor,

I rewrote some of the incremental completion for make that I sent
previously. Hopefully this is clearer.

  commit-4a1e30f-incremental-completion

It offers make targets for completion only as far as the next slash in
each target that matches the current word. This causes incremental
completion behaviour like regular file and directory completion.

When displaying possible completions, it also avoids displaying all
the parent directories of the target being completed, ie:

 foo/all-x86<tab><tab>

will display:

 all-x86-bins
 all-x86-libs
 all-x86-sub-components/

instead of:

 foo/all-x86-bins
 foo/all-x86-libs
 foo/all-x86-sub-components/bins
 foo/all-x86-sub-components/libs

This makes a big difference to usability for many non-autotools
makefiles where there can be large numbers of long paths matching any
prefix.


I am also considering an improvement to display for autotools
makefiles offering common prefix suggestions when displaying
alternatives up to a dash character in order to keep the number of
lines to display useful information to a practical level. eg:

all-<many>-bins
clean-<many>

which can later become:

all-foo-bins
all-bar-bins

or

clean-foo
clean-bar

After the user has added more of a word.

That's just a pipe-dream at the moment. Opinions wanted.

Regards,
Tristan Wibberley

On 5 September 2012 22:50, Igor Murzov <e-mail at date.by> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Sep 2012 19:59:06 +0100
> Tristan Wibberley <tristan.wibberley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> commit-a1843b3: Rolled up previous changes. Also made the displayed
>> suggestions only show the next step of the completion, like file and
>> folder completion. Fixed whitespace.
>
> Sorry, I don't understand how $mode works in this patch.
> So I pushed the first version of the patch with some formatting
> fixes:
>
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=bash-completion/bash-completion.git;a=commit;h=b28d7108d3677c61bd01c51ccee8bb1cf9e3bfba
>
>
> -- Igor
>
>> On 5 September 2012 14:32, Igor Murzov <e-mail at date.by> wrote:
>> > On Sat, 1 Sep 2012 09:14:41 +0100
>> > Tristan Wibberley <tristan.wibberley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Hello bash completion team.
>> >>
>> >> Forwarding my changes to the team now that I discovered there is a
>> >> mailling list for this.
>> >>
>> >> Please consider applying the attached git commits for bash-completion for make.
>> >>
>> >> attachments:
>> >>   commit-aef2ee - converts make completion to use more metadata for
>> >> better results
>> >>   commit-6d1b6d9 - simplifies regex, adds more exclusions
>> >>   commit-d05dbbc - scalability and speed + incremental completions.
>> >>
>> >> The commits against
>> >> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=bash-completion/bash-completion.git
>> >> improve bash completion for make by replacing the processing command
>> >> for the output of make -np
>> >>
>> >> This lists all explicit targets, no intermediates, and no source files.
>> >>
>> >> For an automake project like gcc there is almost no difference in
>> >> output completions. For gcc's generated makefile a couple of
>> >> completions are not proposed in this version which are proposed by the
>> >> existing version and these are not buildable targets in that project's
>> >> make system.
>> >>
>> >> Performance even for small makefiles like gcc's is improved.
>> >>
>> >> For makefiles with .INTERMEDIATE targets properly marked up then
>> >> generated deps rules, targets of those deps and intermediate files do
>> >> not get listed thus the patch avoids suggesting most of the targets a
>> >> user doesn't want.
>> >>
>> >> For the linux kernel makefiles, completion time is reduced to one
>> >> quarter of the time to process the makefiles, nearly halving the
>> >> latency while returning most useful targets (taking the list from 88
>> >> to four digits) and keeping the number of suggestions small (taking
>> >> the first round of suggestions up to the first slash from 88 to 100 or
>> >> so because it supports incremental completion where targets are in
>> >> subdirectories.).
>> >>
>> >> For a makefile such as the example at
>> >> http://codeshot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/this-is-program-that-lists-targets-in.html
>> >> the improvement is dramatic. When I create 4 empty files named
>> >> test/a.cc test/b.cc test/c.cc test/d.cc in a subfolder "test" below
>> >> that Makefile this version of make target completion generates 14
>> >> useful user targets and no source files vs 2 useful targets and 5
>> >> source files for the existing bash completion awk expression.
>> >
>> > Hi, Tristan.
>> >
>> > I like your patches. Completion for make was always somewhat
>> > incomplete and with your patches it definitely works!
>> >
>> > Some small remarks about the patches:
>> >
>> > * Your way to parse the output of `make -npq` does not work
>> >   for me unless LC_ALL=C is set. So please use `LC_ALL=C make -npq`
>> >   to get correct results on other locales.
>> >
>> > * We don't use tabs for formatting. And commit-d05dbbc has
>> >   one tab in it. And there is also one whitespace issue in
>> >   this patch:
>> >
>> >   $ git apply commit-aef2eee commit-6d1b6d9 commit-d05dbbc
>> >   commit-d05dbbc:279: trailing whitespace.
>> >           COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$(
>> >   warning: 1 line adds whitespace errors.
>> >
>> > Also, it's may be better to squash these 3 patches into one
>> > single patch, because it seems better for me to review the
>> > changes as a whole. Anyway, the patches are great!
>> >
>> >
>> > -- Igor
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