Bash completion support for rubygems.

I have useed these versions of rubygems a lot during development of this script and in my general ruby use:

• 1.8.10
• 1.8.11
• 1.8.15

Other versions shold work fine regardless unless the interface to gem suddenly changed. It's probably worth trying on any version that's even remotely "recent-ish".

Put rubygems-completion.bash in one of the following locations:

• /etc/bash_completion.d
• /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d
• ~/.bash_completion.d

or otherwise make sure it is sourced into your shell.

You can apply completion to your own function or alias with _gemcomp. I recommend using this if possible, instead of calling complete directly, for future compatability.

The function _gem handles completion for the top-level gem command itself. For example:

alias rg="command /some/obscure/path/to/gem"
_gemcomp _gem rg

If you want to alias a specific gem command, hook directly to the command's completion function instead of going through _gem. The command functions are named by the command name itself prefixed with _gem_ (e.g. _gem_foo for the gem foo command).

alias gi="command gem install --verbose"
_gemcomp _gem_install gi

Initially, I dynamically pulled some of the completion lists out of gem itself, but that turned out to be VERY slow in practice. An extra second or two on each execution of .bashrc is just too much delay.

It might be practical to have several versions of the options, and select them by a simple version user-setting, but... that's not really any different than just choosing the correct version of the file to load in the first place.

I'm open to suggestions, though, if anybody has an idea on how to do this efficiently.

I'm currently experimenting with a compromise on the above dynamic-vs-speed issue: precompiling the what I parse out of the gem command into to bash arrays. It would require triggering a "recompile" task when rubygems is updated, but I suspect that's not too big of an issue.

I will never change the default of this script away form the the "inoffensive and fast" default that it has right now, but an optional dynamic-update feature could be useful.

At a minimum, I need to find the various rubygems_plugin.rb in gems so the top-level command list can be completed correctly, even when gem itself has been extended.

Copyright (c) 2011,2012 Brent Sanders [email protected]

Derived losely from git-completion.sh in the git-sh package, copyright (c) 2006,2007 Shawn O. Pearce [email protected], itself being conceptually based on gitcompletion.

Distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0.