Re: [PATCH] ol.el: Restore complete by description for insert link

[Ihor Radchenko]

Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> writes:

> I believe that descriptions as completion options were removed because 
> ido signals an error when nil is passed inside completion list. I 
> consider it as a bug in ido (at least in Emacs-27), but even when 
> `completing-read-default' is used, it causes appearance of undesired 
> "nil" option. No description is a frequent case for links.

This sounds reasonable.

In general, there should be no need to care which completion backend is
used by Emacs - they should all plug into `completing-read' without
anything special to be done on Org side.

The only exception is possible not-yet-fixed bugs in earlier Emacs
versions. However, workaround for such issues should be clearly marked
by a comment in the code and removed once the problematic Emacs version
support is dropped.

> So I am attaching a patch to restore completion of link targets by their 
> description, nil descriptions are filtered out.

Thanks!
Applied onto main.
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git/commit/?id=0432f4fe6ba9b07c17ac555beab1527d8f844234

> The change is caused by the auto-desc local variable in 
> `org-insert-link', its usage is rather strange and confusing currently. 
>   Despite with this patch descriptions are restored, I believe that 
> logic related to auto-desc should be removed, anyway it was broken for 
> 10 years. I am unsure in which thread the next change should be discussed.

To be frank, org-insert-link should be eventually refactored or at least
better commented. This is one of the "old" functions in Org mode and its
code style is not ideal.

I think that the best approach to fix this and similar functions will be
discussing/documenting the overall design of the Org link
storage/completion. We can then work towards removing inconsistencies
and subtle bugs in the code.

Now, even not all the functionality of org-insert-link is described in
its docstring (like re-using selected region).

-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at https://orgmode.org/.
Support Org development at https://liberapay.com/org-mode,
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