Re: [QUERY] Why do we have git-completion.zsh?

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
>
>>>                             However, I don't understand why we
>>> maintain it, because there's a comprehensive first-class completer in
>>> ZSH core [1] which I use all the time.  Shouldn't the completion folks
>>> be contributing to this instead?
>>
>> Only if they want to.
> [...]
>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/210022/focus=210024
>
> Sorry, wrong link.  Here's a better one:
>
> http://www.zsh.org/mla/workers/2011/msg00497.html
>
> More fundamentally, your question seems to assume some kind of shared
> plan regarding what people work on, rather than each person choosing
> to work on what they consider valuable without having to justify it to
> others.  I am very happy with Felipe's work on git's completion code
> and don't think it does any harm to efforts elsewhere.

To complement the reason; the zsh folks (or perhaps it's only one; who
works on the git stuff), absolutely prioritize "correctness" over
speed, that means if it takes ten seconds to list all the possible
files to complete, grouped nicely, that's exactly what they'll do,
instead of the way the bash completion does, which lists the most
likely files, which takes milliseconds.

I found zsh's completion unbearably slow, which is ironic; git is the
fastest DSCM on Earth, and they blow the performance away by making
the completion dead slow, to the point where the completion is several
orders of magnitude slower than the actual command. To me, the whole
point of the completion is to make the work faster, and if the
completion takes longer than me typing it, what's the point of it?

And I'm not the only one, when I contributed this stuff to
oh-my-zsh[1] I got a very positive response.

I couldn't convince them of this obvious fact, so I choose git's bash
fast completion.

I have patches to improve the zsh thin wrapper to give more
information, zsh style, in a way that is superior to zsh's git
completion, but I'm still not happy with them, I want the user to be
able to configure the output so it's not totally bloated like in zsh,
and I'm still working on it. In the mean time, I want my completion to
be blazingly fast, and at least as good as git's bash completion.

If they wanted my contributions, that would be awesome, but that
doesn't appear to be the case. And I'm kind of relieved, because zsh's
completion is monstrous code, and the zsh development practices are
not good (e.g. all my logically independent patches get squashed into
one commit).

Cheers.

[1] https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

-- 
Felipe Contreras