Re: [VM] vm-pcrisis

[Uday Reddy]

Jay Borkenhagen writes:

> One thing that isn't quite working as I used to have or as is
> documented in the texinfo is the prompting.  Per the texinfo:
> 
>   One thing to bear in mind is that when you are prompted, there will
>   be auto-completion available -- you'll only need to type enough to
>   uniquely identify a profile (you won't even need to hit TAB).
> 
> I find that I do need to hit tab now to get the auto-completion.  

I have now investigated what has happened to VMPC.  VMPC was written by Rob
Hodges, and probably posted on the VM newsgroup.  Rob Fenk picked it up and
included it in his unofficial distribution, which eventually became the
current VM distribution (VM 8.0.x, 8.1.x,...).

In July 2006, Rob Fenk writes in the development log

  Added vm-pcrisis.texi and set versions of VMPC to 1.0
  The maintainer will not come back so I will take over!

which suggests that Rob Hodges had discontinued contact and the control
passed to Rob Fenk.  I see that Rob F made significant changes to VMPC, some
that are not consistent with the manual.  He did not always update the
manual to reflect the changes.

The inconsistency you found here is an instance of that situation.  In the
original VMPC, a "profile" was a single VMPC action, which was
auto-completed.  Rob F changed "profile" to mean a list of actions, and the
list elements had to be entered by typing <RET>.  So, I presume
auto-completion via <RET> was discarded.  The doc string for
`vmpc-prompt-for-profile' describes what is going on.  The manual continues
to say what it used to say, but the code has diverged.

I would agree that this is an unsatisfactory situation.  But there have been
regular users of VMPC on this list, and they don't seem to have complained
about these issues.  And, users like you that continued to use old
versions didn't complain either.  Now Rob F has also discontinued contact.
So, until and unless we get a new maintainer for VMPC, we have to make do
with what we have.

I might at some point decide to write my own version of VMPC.  But it will
be a new package which will strive to avoid all the mess with the current
package.  I won't bother to maintain consistency with any of the existing
versions.

Cheers,
Uday