completions and modules don't work together about just

[casey]

Yah, this is definitely annoying.

I would have actually liked to have different recipes be tab separated in the output of just --summary, so that recipes in modules could be space separated, i.e., if there's a recipe foo and a recipe bar in module baz, just --summary would output foo\tbar\sbaz, so then you could split on tabs to the valid recipes. Unfortunately, this would break any scripts which relied on splitting the output of just --summary on spaces, or on whitespace, so I opted to use the :: syntax instead. Eventually, when recipes can have dependencies that are in other modules, I'll probably wind up using the same syntax for dependencies:

mod baz

foo: baz::bar

I'm not opposed to adding foo::bar as an additional syntax to call recipes in modules from the command line. It seems a bit inelegant to add it just to make the lives of completion scripts easier, but I think some people will prefer that syntax anyhow, and if it becomes the actual syntax for dependencies in other modules, being able to use that syntax on the command line makes sense.

[casey]

Another thing that the completion scripts could do is split on ::, but I have basically never touched the completion scripts personally, and always left them to other brave souls, so I don't know how annoying this would be to do.

[crdx]

Differentiating between spaces and tabs in completion results sounds messy to me, and like you said, probably backwards-incompatible.

Developers tend to be used to the concept of namespace separators, and :: is a common one.

In the past I've wanted to use : to create categories of recipe, e.g. make:migration but couldn't because : is not valid in a recipe name. I would use this feature to put all the make recipes in make.just and reference them as a module, which would tidy things up.

Unfortunately if invoking module recipes by :: became the only way, the output of just --list would probably need to change from the neat tabbed output to a flat list with module recipes listed as foo::bar, otherwise it wouldn't be clear how to invoke them.

Not sure what's best either way, so just sharing my thoughts.

[crdx]

Unfortunately, this would break any scripts which relied on splitting the output of just --summary on spaces

Not sure if that'd be something worth doing as (at least with bash) it's not the completion script's job to split up the input:

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Variables.html#index-COMP_005fWORDS

It does mention COMP_WORDBREAKS but imo completions are fragile enough even without trying to change the defaults.

[casey]

Unfortunately if invoking module recipes by :: became the only way, the output of just --list would probably need to change from the neat tabbed output to a flat list with module recipes listed as foo::bar, otherwise it wouldn't be clear how to invoke them.

I'd definitely allow both :: separated and space separated from the command line, since I personally like space-separated, and space is one character, whereas :: is two characters, and requires shift.

Not sure if that'd be something worth doing as (at least with bash) it's not the completion script's job to split up the input:

Ahh, good catch. So I guess separating by tabs wouldn't work anyway.

[casey]

Fixed in #1809, recipes can now be invoked on the command line with path syntax, i.e., foo::bar.

[crdx]

Nice. Thanks.