Re: [PATCH] bash: support user-supplied completion scripts for user's git commands

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de>
Date: Feb 26, 2010, 15:27 UTC
Message-ID: <20100226152710.GA17460@neumann>
In-Reply-To: <7viqakireb.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:32:12PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Admittedly, we have already taken over _git_foo (and "_git") namespace,
> and anybody who uses bash with the completion support cannot write their
> own shell function with these names for purposes that are unrelated to
> completion,

Actually, the "_" namespace is taken over by bash completion in general, so writing shell functions starting with "_" is probably not a good idea anyway. E.g. to see all non-completion-related shell functions you can do a "declare -F |grep -v ' _'", but if you name shell functions not related to completion as _git_foo(), then this will no longer work.

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> so in that sense, the patch is not introducing a new problem,
> but making it a documented interface and casting it in stone will make the
> namespace contamination issue harder to rectify later.
> 
> So if we were to go in the direction as the patch proposes (which I think
> is a good idea), we might want to rename them to __git_completion_foo or
> something that is less likely to collide with whatever names users might
> want to use. It is my understanding that the only published interface so
> far is __git_ps1.

I would say that __git_ps1() is the only interface that is advertised as being public. If someone is unsatisfied with the completion script, because he wanted completion for a custom git command or for a frequently used plumbing command, then I bet he just reused existing functions, e.g. when he needed refs, he just used __git_refs(), or when he needed git log's options, he used _git_log(). I did that, probably others too. If we were to rename completion functions, these people's setup will break (although they will likely get merge conflicts caused by this patch anyway). On the other hand: should we really care that much about such users, who use non-pulic interfaces from contrib/ ?

Having said all that, I don't really care either way. If you or Shawn would prefer to have the completion functions renamed, I will do a s/this/that/ preparation patch for the series. BTW, Mercurial's completion script uses _hg_cmd_foo() for hg commands and _hg_ext_bar() for extensions, so we might as well be a bit consistent, and call our completion functions _git_cmd_foo().

Best, Gábor