Did we reach a consensus on this? Would it change things if this could be
implemented with a very small changeset?

People brought up that it seems similar to the bash completion - perhaps we
can share code between the two features? I think it's a great idea from a
usability standpoint, and seeing another junior engineer start to use
manage.py I think it could make a difference to beginners.

I've made a simple PR that uses the stdlib 'difflib.get_close_matches'
which seems to be pretty great at suggesting the right command and it's
also less code to maintain: https://github.com/django/django/pull/9703

With this the output 'manage.py rnserver' would be:

Unknown command 'rnserver'. Did you mean runserver?
Type 'manage.py help' for usage.

On 17 Jul 2017 10:32, "Adam Johnson" <[email protected]> wrote:

> I feel like this mostly duplicates the bash completion logic we have,
> which is also more standard across other CLI's
>
> However I agree with Tom that correcting for typos is the main use case,
> using levehshtein distance is a good idea.
>
> Another thing that some CLI's have, like npm or arc is auto-correction
> for common typos, e.g. ./manage.py mgriate could print out a message
> 'Assuming you meant migrate' and then continue executing migrate, not
> sure if this is the best for Django though where commands can be
> arbitrarily added by third party apps.
>
>
>
> On 17 July 2017 at 09:47, Tom Forbes <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Vlada:
>> I think this is a great idea for improving the usability of manage.py,
>> especially for newcomers. When I looked your current implementation used a
>> simple 'in' to find suggestions, but this is not great for the most
>> obvious/common use case: typos.
>>
>> I would strongly advocate for using the levenshtein distance algorithm if
>> this does get merged, there are some simple and succinct python
>> implementations we can use, and the algorithm itself is what git uses to
>> suggest commands (and I've always found that quite good).
>>
>> Brice:
>> You are right in that this is a case that could happen in part due to
>> this feature, but it's a long shot and IMO the benefits outweigh the risks.
>> This can happen without this feature anyway - if someone is typing in
>> random manage.py commands without thinking then issues can and will arise.
>> The only preventative measure we could take would be to add an "are you
>> sure?" prompt after every manage.py invocation which is not a great idea
>> overall.
>>
>> For newcomers though this could be great, seeing the 'command not found'
>> message can be confusing and unhelpful, any help we can add to that is a
>> good thing IMO. Adding stars to the command invocation can be even more
>> confusing as users have to escape them (and if they don't they could end up
>> running random commands) and it's not terribly nice UI wise.
>>
>> Built in shell autocompletion would be the best way forward in this case,
>> at least for non-windows users. Kubectl has a nice way of doing this:
>> source <(kubectl completion bash|zsh). Maybe something like this could be
>> adapted for manage.py?
>>
>>
>> On 17 Jul 2017 08:49, "Brice PARENT" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> I'm not sure how I feel about that. It feels like a good idea at first,
>> but it might lead to dangerous behaviours.
>>
>> Let me explain my thought: having such a feature would encourage people
>> to use it (of course). Doing so can lead so side effects. For example,  if,
>> in a project you're working on, you want to use a custom management command
>> named "migrate_data_to_other_server", you might end up typing
>> "./manage.oy migrate" in hope for the system to display the exact name that
>> you probably have forgotten. But it won't, it will migrate your database
>> instead. What I mean is that executing commands that shouldn't work on
>> purpose might lead to executing the wrong command instead. And management
>> commands might be dangerous if not used at the right time (I've seen
>> management commands being used to push code to production for example.
>> Executing them by error in a dev environment might be a real issue!).
>>
>> I'd prefer to encourage the use of "./manage.py help", which lists all
>> available commands, or use masks when searching for a command ("./manage.py
>> migrate*"). When you want to look for the name of a command, you'd know
>> that adding a star somewhere won't execute anything other than listing
>> available commands matching the value you just gave. And every developer
>> knows (I think) how to use wildcards.
>>
>> -Brice
>>
>> Le 15/07/17 à 18:36, Vláďa Macek a écrit :
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I had an idea that would save me time working with Django:
>>
>> The manage.py wouldn't only print "Unknown command" when incomplete
>> subcommand name given, but also print those available by substring search.
>>
>> https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/28398
>>
>> I added a screenshot and a patch there.
>>
>> In my opinion, such first implementation could be as simple as that.
>> Smarter versions may come later.
>>
>> As suggested by Tim Graham (thanks, Tim), I resort here for opinions.
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> Vlada Macek
>>
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