Autocompletion does not work about cobra HOT 10 CLOSED

In case anyone with mac stumble onto this issue, here is the fix:

apache/openwhisk#2924 (comment)

_get_comp_words_by_ref: command not found

It looks that for Mac users in addition of installing the bash-completion

brew install bash-completion
The user also have to configure bash-completion package in their ~/.bash_profile if they have one or in the ~/.profile
By adding the following

if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion
fi

from cobra.

@eparis any tips?

from cobra.

_init_completion is supposed to be included either with bash or with the bash_completions package...

from cobra.

I guess we need to have it fail silently instead of letting users know they need bash-completions > version 1.90 (I think that's where it was added)

I wouldn't want a noisy failure in a script loaded at login....

from cobra.

http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/bash-completion/bash-completion.git/tree/bash_completion#n669

from cobra.

I could probably switch to _get_comp_words_by_ref which seems to be even older...

_get_comp_words_by_ref: ver 1.2 was June 2010
_init_completion: ver 1.90 was Nov 2011

I'll take suggestions, but it seems to me like Nov 2011 should recent enough support...

from cobra.

In my case I was trying to get it running under zsh --- It runs fine in bash on my Ubuntu 14.10. I will close this as "my fault".

from cobra.

I haven't looked at zsh, but it might be relatively easy to support, dunno.....

from cobra.

this also causes problems under Mac OS using brew. The default bash-completion version you get with brew is too old.
Installing the newer version is a no-go for some since it requires to switch to a newer bash version (4.x) but OS X only ships with 3.x.
why not support the older bash-completion? what's the drawback?

~ > bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin14)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
~ > brew info bash-completion
bash-completion: stable 1.3 (bottled)
Programmable bash completion
https://bash-completion.alioth.debian.org/
~ > system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType
Software:

    System Software Overview:

      System Version: OS X 10.10.4 (14E46)
      Kernel Version: Darwin 14.4.0

from cobra.

The only 'drawback' is that I don't have a Mac and don't use 5 year out of date bash-completion. So I don't know how to do it. _init_completion (and in turn __get_comp_words_by_ref) are incredibly complex functions I can't truly understand and so I will not copy them wholesale into our codebase (as then we have to maintain them, and I'm just not up to the task)

If someone writes a 'simple' patch which adds compatibility further back, I'd be REALLY happy to take it. (where simple means I can understand it). I have no idea what is or isn't possible on a mac. Maybe it has _comp_words_by_ref and you can find a way to switch to that directly?

from cobra.