Re: strace completion (Re: grouping/joining _values)

[Phil Pennock <zsh-workers+phil.pennock@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2008-06-13 at 12:12 +0000, Clint Adams wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 04:33:02AM -0700, Phil Pennock wrote:
> > Are there any other useful strategies for extracting the real list of
> > syscalls at runtime, so that on systems which package up the same
> > version of zsh for N years the list doesn't grow stale?
> 
> On the other hand, the list of syscalls is hard-coded into strace at
> build time, so you probably don't want a dynamic completion list either.

On the gripping hand, the modification time of the zsh completion file
in a particular distribution probably has little, if any, correlation to
the build time of strace.  Especially when zsh devel work happens on a
devel branch with many years between "stable" releases, so many OSes by
default are shipping zsh 4.2.x, so zsh 4.4.x will hang around for a long
time.

The closest we can come to being up-to-date is to get the values as
currently known on the system; if strace hasn't been rebuilt recently,
that's not zsh's problem.  :)  That's for the sysadmin to rebuild strace
to get the latest syscalls if they're interested in them.

If we can't get the values currently known, then we're back to
approximations.  If we had a portable non-gcc way of doing this, I'd
feel better about saying "if you don't have a compiler, why are you
analysing trace dumps", thus my question above, seeking other techniques
for extracting the list.

-Phil