Hi bot people,
did anyone try creating command line autocompletion [1] for bot scripts? We are setting up a sort of toolserver for the bot owners on Hungarian Wikipedia, and trying to make it a comfortable environment, and parameter autocompletion would be a big step towards that.
I'm interested both in quick and dirty hacks (my current plan is to grep out the arg.startswith parameters from the bot code and use them as a more or less correct argument list) and a long-term solution for making pywikipediabot parameter handling and help generation easy both for the bot programmer and the bot user. I'm thinking along the lines of defining a list of options, with a couple field for each options: short name, long name(s), help text, whether it takes an option (a bit like getopts in Linux, just with cleaner syntax). Some helper function would then process the command line based on that, and the bot programmer would just have to iterate trough the results, without all the ugly string manipulation that is currently required. This would have several advantages: - easier parameter handling and help text autogeneration - automatic generation of bash completion files - it could pave the way for moving towards a more linux-like command syntax with double dashes before long arguments and the other usual features - it would make it possible to create GUI controls for the bots, with auto-generated option fields
What do you think about it? Am I overcomplicating, or reinventing the wheel, or is this worth doing?
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Programmable-Completio...