[PATCH v8 0/2] send-email: shell completion improvements

From: Thiago Perrotta <tbperrotta@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 25, 2021, 21:27 UTC
Message-ID: <20211025212707.188151-1-tbperrotta@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <87fst7lkjx.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

> ...I think that re-indentation is better left alone for the patch
> readability.

Reverted the `GetOptions` indentation. Noise is now gone :-)

> First, in your 1/3 you're adding a \n, but in 2/3 we end up with \n\n. I
> think you can just skip 1/3, maybe mention "how it also has a "\n" in
> the commit message.

I don't quite see how this would fit into the commit message. A comment in the code seems to fit better to account for this detail. That's what I did, but if you still disagree, please elaborate where in the commit message this sentence should be added.

> You then strip out "--" arguments from the combined list, but isn't this
> something we do need to emit? I.e. it's used as syntax by the bash
> completion isn't it? (I just skimmed the relevant C code in
> parse-options.c).

I interpreted that standalone `--` as an extraneous / useless token. If it's there intentionally, then I am reverting my stripping of it. At the end of the day whether to include it or not is a small detail, but FYI, when I do:

  $ git clone -<TAB>

in bash, nothing happens. I would have expected it to be expanded to "--" because of the explicit "--", but it doesn't. Therefore my conclusion is that "--" in the output of "--git-completion-helper" is useless. Am I missing something? What would be the function of the standalone "--" then?

From my local testing, whether the options are sorted or not, whether they are repeated or not, whether they follow a specific order with respect to "--" or not, all of those details seem not to matter. Bash completion seems to handle all of those cases just fine interactively.

In fact, here's another example:

$ git init --git-completion-helper | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -C1 '^--$' --no-template -- --no-bare

...there are --no-* options both _before_ and _after_ the --. I really cannot see the point of the -- in the output, it seems to be just noise.

I readded -- to the output anyway since you requested it, but if it needs to follow a certain spec w.r.t. ordering, we should have tests for it. This specific part (the -- and the --no- order thing) of the commit is something I am not keen to doing though, at least not in this patch series; sorry, it already goes far beyond the scope of my original intent. Anything else you ask for that is inline with the original intent (like generating options programatically instead of hard-coding them) I am fine with though, and in fact I believe I have addressed all comments so far, if there's anything else I may have missed let me know.

> I.e. we should not simply strip the trailing "=" etc., we need to parse
> those out of the Perl GetOptions arguments, and come up with mapping to
> what we do in parse-options.c. I think that's basically adding a "=" at
> the end of all options that end with "=s", ":i", "=d", ":s" etc.

OK, I see. This is a valid point, I updated the code to reflect this desired behavior. PTAL. If needed we could make it more DRY, but as it is now it seems quite readable.

Show 5 quoted lines

> We then don't want to emit "-h", but you strip out "--h", first we
> mapped "h" to "--h" in the loop above, so we should do that there. But
> better yet we have a "%dump_aliases_options" already, maybe it +
> "git-completion-helper" can be moved to another "%not_for_completion"
> hash or something.

OK, done. Introduced a "not_for_completion" hash. Doesn't seem to make a huge difference compared to just using `grep` though.

Differences from V7:

As per Ævar's comments:

- completely drop 1/3 since we'now using split instead of print to incorporate
  format-patch options. Side effect: then-extraneous '\n' is now gone.

- revert indentation (tabs) on GetOptions to eliminate diff noise (as per Ævar's
  interpretation of original Carlos's comment)

- re-add "--" to the output of "git send-email --git-completion-helper"

- introduce a "not_for_completion" hash to remove undesired options from the
  output

- add trailing = to send-email options that expect a string or an integer
  argument, consistently with format-patch options

Thiago Perrotta (2):
  send-email: programmatically generate bash completions
  send-email docs: add format-patch options

 Documentation/git-send-email.txt       |  6 ++-
 contrib/completion/git-completion.bash | 11 +----
 git-send-email.perl                    | 56 +++++++++++++++++++++-----
 t/t9902-completion.sh                  |  3 ++
 4 files changed, 54 insertions(+), 22 deletions(-)

-- 
2.33.1