Debian Bug report logs - #392495
bash completion for xargs

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Tim Connors <reportbug@rather.puzzling.org>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: bash completion for xargs

Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:40:20 +1000

Package: bash
Version: 3.1-4
Severity: normal

I believe xargs completion shouldn't be done through merely _longopt
-- it should be using the _command meta-command completion (at least
instead of _longopt -- but perhaps could be made to use both of them),
since you can supply programs with quite complicated sets of flags
before the list of filenames that xargs additionally tacks on the end.

Most commandline invocations of xargs aren't done using any of the
xargs flags (well, until the user finds problems with their xargs
invocation), and thus we find the user will be wanting the
meta-command completion more often than the longopt completions.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15.1
Locale: LANG=en_AU, LC_CTYPE=en_AU (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages bash depends on:
ii  base-files                   3.1.16      Debian base system miscellaneous f
ii  debianutils                  2.17        Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  libc6                        2.3.6.ds1-4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libncurses5                  5.5-4       Shared libraries for terminal hand

bash recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information

Message #14 received at 392495-done@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: David Paleino <d.paleino@gmail.com>

To: 392495-done@bugs.debian.org

Cc: Tim Connors <reportbug@rather.puzzling.org>, Bash-Completion Developers <bash-completion-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>

Subject: Re: bash completion for xargs

Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 23:10:29 +0200

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

fixed 392495 bash-completion/20060301-4
thanks

Hi Tim,

On Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:40:20 +1000, Tim Connors wrote:

> I believe xargs completion shouldn't be done through merely _longopt
> -- it should be using the _command meta-command completion (at least
> instead of _longopt -- but perhaps could be made to use both of them),
> since you can supply programs with quite complicated sets of flags
> before the list of filenames that xargs additionally tacks on the end.
> 
> Most commandline invocations of xargs aren't done using any of the
> xargs flags (well, until the user finds problems with their xargs
> invocation), and thus we find the user will be wanting the
> meta-command completion more often than the longopt completions.

I believe this is already fixed in the latest bash-completion package (i.e.
20060301-4). I'm thus closing this bug, please feel free to comment further.

Kindly,
David

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