Re: _git: Improve handling of aliases

[Miroslav Koškár <mk@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Daniel,

bellow to things not addressed in my recent patchset.

On Jun 26, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> Sure.  Alternatively, we could continue to retrieve all aliases but
> cache that list between calls (see _store_cache; there are examples in
> _subversion).

I see, good to know. It seems fast enough to me as is so *shrug*.

> Well, yes and no.  The arguments to shell aliases seem to be handled
> similarly to arguments to «eval»: joined by spaces and then passed to
> system(3).  That means it's valid to pass the entire string in a single
> shell word, or to translate any of the spaces in the desired result
> string into word breaks at the shell input level, just like «eval hello
> world» and «eval 'hello world'» are equivalent.
>
> So, how about completing this the same way «eval -- <TAB>» is completed?
> Currently ${_comps[eval]} is _precommand, which just calls _normal, but
> that's incomplete¹.  If we write the code to do something along the
> lines of «words=(eval -- …); CURRENT=…; _normal», it'll automatically
> grow support for completing both variants once such support is added to
> «eval»'s completion.²
>
> ¹ For example, «eval 'git -c' <TAB>» completes files rather than
>   configuration options, because it takes 'git -c' rather than just 'git'
>   to be the command word.
>
> ² That'd be something along the lines of «words=( ${=:-"${words}"} )»,
>   I guess?  Plus adjusting $CURRENT, etc..

Right, I understand your points generally. I see the similarity to eval,
even though there is an important distinction I think:

    (git alias) test = !echo hello
    $ git test \; world
    hello ; world

So git executes aliases more akin to:

    sh -c 'echo hello "$@"' arg0 \; world

As for doing 'words=(eval ...); _normal', it doesn't work for complex
commands e.g., eval cd dir '&&' ls -<TAB>.

I understand you would like to have that work in future and I agree what
would be cool and would certainly help here. With my limited knowledge
of zsh internals and complexity of completion I'll leave this to others
:). While proposed split on simple command separators might seem crude
it actually works quite fine.

> As above, I'd prefer to delegate to «eval»'s completion.  Alternatively,
> my previous point about supporting comments stands.

Ahhh, so that's (Z+C+) instead of (z), forgot about that.
Well it's not like a common case to use comments there, mind you it's
a bit weird to even use them in gitconfig, managed to make an example:

    test = !echo hello \n \
        "#" let this be a commented line \n \
        echo world

Ok, I'll wait for your comments on the patchset I've sent before and
this too and then either incorporate (Z+C+) with other changes or sent
it separately.

Regards,
Miro