Re: proposal: GDBM completion

[Richard Coleman <coleman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I wonder whether we could implement some data base completion.  What I
> want to have is man page completion, but reading all the man pages from
> an NFS server is very slow, and we have so many man pages installed that
> I don't want zsh to keep the list in memory.
> 
> The newer Berkeley db library has a B-tree database type, which can be
> searched the way we need to implement completion.  Wouldn't it be
> possible to implement some database lookup completion ?  I'd like to
> write a new man(1) which uses the database to find the man pages, and
> I'd like to have zsh complete my man pages ;)

I believe Tom Christiansen has written a version of man in perl that uses
ndbm for indexing.  Also tkman can use the database glimpse for similar
things.

As to building in completion support for this in zsh, I'm not sure.  I would
have to be convinced that it would be generally useful.   A possibility is
that I could put patches for such features in a Contrib subdirectory.  But I'm
tied up in other zsh work right now.

rc