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Improve apropos to show some indication of namespace of symbols found

Description

apropos does find all symbols in all namespaces that match the argument, but the return value gives no clue as to which namespace the found symbols are in. It can even return multiple occurrences of the same symbol, which only gives a clue that the symbol exists in more than one namespace, but not which ones. For example:

It would be nice if the returned symbols could indicate the namespace.

With the screened patch clj-1191-v3.patch applied the output for the examples above becomes:

Patch: clj-1191-v3.patch

Screened by: Alex Miller

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Andy Fingerhut August 20, 2014 at 11:05 PM

Patch clj-1191-v3.patch is identical to clj-1191-patch-v3.txt mentioned in the previous comment, but conforms to the requested .patch or .diff file name ending.

Andy Fingerhut August 20, 2014 at 11:02 PM

Patch clj-1191-patch-v3.txt attempts to address Alex Miller's comments on the v2 patch.

Perhaps the diff will get down to a 1-line change

Alex Miller August 20, 2014 at 7:34 PM

Some comments on the code itself:

1) I don't think we should do anything special for ns - there are plenty of ways to search your current ns. I think it unnecessarily adds a lot of complexity without enough value.
2) Rather than finding vars and work back to syms, I think this should instead retain the ns context as it walks the ns-publics keys so that you can easily reassemble a fully-qualified symbol name.
3) Why do you need the set at the end? Seems like symbols should already be unique at this point?

Andy Fingerhut August 20, 2014 at 6:27 PM

Patch clj-1191-patch-v2.txt dated Aug 20 2014 modifies apropos so that every symbol returned has a full namespace qualifier, even if it is in clojure.core. Before this patch:

After this patch:

Alex Miller August 20, 2014 at 5:22 PM

If you have "use"d many namespaces (which is not uncommon at the repl), this updated apropos still doesn't help you understand where a particular function is coming from (as the ns will be omitted). It's cool that this patch is "unresolving" and finding the shortest-alias etc but I think it's actually doing too much. In my opinion, simply providing the full namespace for all matches would actually be more useful (and easier).

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Created April 5, 2013 at 1:52 AM
Updated August 29, 2014 at 6:00 PM
Resolved August 29, 2014 at 6:00 PM