Re: [libvirt] [PATCH 08/11] tools: Provide bash autompletion file

On 11/08/2017 09:09 AM, Michal Privoznik wrote: [I haven't read this thread closely yet, just adding a drive-by comment] Several years ago, when autocompletion was attempted (and failed) as a GSoC project, I had several ideas on how completion should work, and how it should be tested. Ideally, we need a new virsh command 'complete', which takes varargs, and then performs completion based on those args. So the bash script for completion for this scenario: $ virsh some-command --arg partial<TAB><TAB> is as simple as having the completion function in bash call: $ virsh complete some-command --arg partial<TAB><TAB> The complete command in virsh should then know that it is performing completion on some-command, and do enough arg parsing to determine how to complete 'partial' in the current context of whatever argument some-command would be parsing at that point. If a user in bash backs up the cursor and types <TAB> somewhere other than the end of the line, hopefully bash gives us enough hooks to call 'virsh complete args-up-to-TAB' by merely truncating whatever appears beyond the point where the user attempted tab completion. ALL the completion logic lives in virsh, nothing in bash - all bash has to do is insert 'complete' and call into virsh. That is, once you've written the bash script, it should NEVER need future modification, because any further improvements to completion will live in virsh (whether you use virsh in interactive mode or in batch mode from the shell). I don't know how much my original idea has carried over into your proposal in this thread, but you may want to read the emails I posted from the archives on the topic, for more ideas. -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org