Re: [PATCH 00/14] completion: a bunch of updates

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
To: Stefan Haller <lists@haller-berlin.de>
Cc: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>, Git <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	"SZEDER Gábor" <szeder.dev@gmail.com>,
	"Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy" <pclouds@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/14] completion: a bunch of updates
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 10:31:06 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAMP44s0+TMhmPYM7omoFhcebMLhZyh6v77WUFNrscRtPNEDNHQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <0ec43318-bf83-25c4-a817-a150e2e47546@haller-berlin.de>

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 3:09 AM Stefan Haller <lists@haller-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> On 28.10.20 1:06, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> > I didn't say the users didn't get the scripts from the distribution, I
> > said I didn't know of anyone that did. I just checked the installation
> > instructions of Homebrew, and they do seem to install the zsh
> > completion from contrib, whoever, by the time I see the bug reports,
> > those users already downloaded the most recent version from GitHub
> > [1].
>
> I might not be the representative zsh user, but just as one data point:
> I have never downloaded the completion scripts from anywhere. I always
> use the one that comes with my "distro" (which is the Mac git installer,
> most of the time, which puts it in /usr/local/git/contrib/completion/).
> I symlink that to ~/.zfunc/_git.

That's interesting. Where did you get the idea to do that?

> > On the other hand my distribution (Arch Linux) does not enable the zsh
> > script by default, it just lies dormant in /usr/share/git/completion,
> > which nobody uses. So users in Arch Linux naturally would download the
> > latest version from GitHub [1] as well.
> >
> > So, which distributions package and enable the zsh script by default? Who knows.
> >
> > I suggested you to graduate those scripts out of contrib so
> > distributions would trust the scripts enough to enable them by
> > default, but you refused.
> >
> > What you do with the scripts is up to you, I only know what would
> > happen depending on what you do. 1) If you leave them as is, some
> > distributions would enable them, others don't, and people will keep
> > downloading the scripts from git's GitHub [1]. 2) If you graduate
> > them, more--if not all--distributions would enable them by default,
> > and less people would download them. 3) If you remove them, people
> > would look for another git repository to download those scripts from.
>
> I don't think it makes a difference whether the scripts live in contrib
> or not. Bash completion is also in contrib, and yet it seems to be
> shipped and enabled by most distros, as far as I can tell.

Apples and oranges.

There is no default completion for git in bash, neither in bash, nor
in bash-completion, so if the distribution doesn't install the
completion in the right place
(/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/git), then the user would have
no git completion.

On zsh the situation is different; zsh by default has a git completion
(/usr/share/zsh/functions/Completion/Unix/_git), and some might argue
it's more complete than git's zsh completion, so why would
distribution maintainers chose the one in 'contrib' (an unofficial
contributed script) over the official one? Indeed they don't, at least
on Arch Linux.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras