Re: Suggestion: Allow whence to report path(s) for autoloaded functions

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I had something of an afterthought on this one ...

On Apr 21,  2:14pm, Ian Tegebo wrote:
}
} It seems like 'whence -v _MYFUNC' is the intuitive place to look for
} this behavior.  I'd imagine it working like:
} 
} $ whence -v _MYFUNC
} _MYFUNC is a shell function defined in /blah/path/_MYFUNC

This information could be misleading.  Functions are not always loaded
from $fpath; they can be defined in init files, edited and/or hand-
entered on the command line, etc.  To make whence useful, the shfunc
structure would have to record where the function came from, or whence
must only report the above if the function has NOT YET been loaded.

There's also the question of what to do about files that are found in
the $fpath directories but are not marked for autoloading.
 
} Consequently, removing the '&& break' provides the expected result for
} 'whence -a':
} 
} $ whence -av _MYFUNC
} _MYFUNC is a shell function defined in /blah/path_one/_MYFUNC
} _MYFUNC is a shell function defined in /blah/path_two/_MYFUNC

That's also misleading.  If _MYFUNC were an executable located in two
directories, it would be possible to explicitly choose which to run
by typing the full path name as reported by whence.  For a function,
there's no [straightforward] way to bypass the fpath search order.

(The non-straightforward way is to run
    FPATH=/blah/path_two:"$FPATH" _MYFUNC
but that can produce unexpected results if _MYFUNC calls autoloaded
functions that should come from /blah/path_one instead.)