make completion is slow for huge Makefiles (generated by Automake) about bash-completion HOT 4 OPEN

Is there any progress on this in the meantime? I even encounter a few seconds wait time with very short makefiles which need to run commands for variables. Can command running be disabled to speedup tab completion at the cost of correctnes?

from bash-completion.

I think there are no efforts on this for now.

with very short makefiles which need to run commands for variables.

In the original report, the time of sed (10 secs) seems to be longer than that of make (4 secs). In the case that commands are run for variables, I guess the time of make should be dominant. What is the result of the following command in the directory?

$ time make -npq | wc

If this explains the most part of the delay you observe, I think it's difficult to improve the response because there is no way to disable only $(shell slow-command) in Makefile unless GNU make supports the feature. However, if we give up completions of all the targets that includes variables or wildcards (such as $(OBJDIR)/file or %.o) and also give up tracking includes, we may just run sed -n 's/^[[:space:]]*\([^:]*[^[:space:]]\)[[:space:]]*:\([^=].*\)\{0,1\}$/\1/p' Makefile to extract target names. Or another way might be to use timeout command to set a timeout for the call of make -npq, and to fall back to the above simple sed on the timeout.

from bash-completion.

I think there are no efforts on this for now.

with very short makefiles which need to run commands for variables.

In the original report, the time of sed (10 secs) seems to be longer than that of make (4 secs). In the case that commands are run for variables, I guess the time of make should be dominant. What is the result of the following command in the directory?

$ time make -npq | wc

If this explains the most part of the delay you observe, I think it's difficult to improve the response because there is no way to disable only $(shell slow-command) in Makefile unless GNU make supports the feature. However, if we give up completions of all the targets that includes variables or wildcards (such as $(OBJDIR)/file or %.o) and also give up tracking includes, we may just run sed -n 's/^[[:space:]]*\([^:]*[^[:space:]]\)[[:space:]]*:\([^=].*\)\{0,1\}$/\1/p' Makefile to extract target names. Or another way might be to use timeout command to set a timeout for the call of make -npq, and to fall back to the above simple sed on the timeout.

Do you have an example how to instruct make to give up completions of all targets that include variables or wildcards as you suggested, or was that a proposal for how this might be resolved? Asking since I have a similar issue and would love it if I can make the completion faster.

from bash-completion.

Do you have an example how to instruct make to give up completions of all targets that include variables or wildcards as you suggested,

No. In addition, that's not what I suggested. As I mentioned, there is no way to do that unless GNU Make would newly support it. What I instead suggested was to give up using make and manually manipulate Makefile, GNUmakefile, etc. using sed, etc.

or was that a proposal for how this might be resolved?

It was a possibility of how the problem might be fixed in bash-completion, and it's not what I expect the users of bash-completion to set up. The problem with this heuristic approach is that it's incomplete, imprecise, and not robust.

from bash-completion.