X-Debbugs-Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.caStarting from "emacs -Q -f shell" (or eshell, doesn't matter) on a GNU/Linux system, type "cp -" and then press TAB. The completions buffer shows a list of completions. However, they don't show the annotations, which in this case should be a helpful string for any option taking an argument.
For example, one completion is "--backup". This takes an optional "CONTROL" argument, which should show in the completions list. However, it doesn't. With the attached patch, the completions list now correctly shows "--backup[=CONTROL]".
This was happening because 'pcomplete-here-using-help' passes along the annotation as a text property on the first character of each completion candidate. That property failed to propagate through 'completion-table-with-quoting' though. So the fix is to propagate text properties on the first character of the candidate, since that's already a convention in a couple places with completion tables.
(There's a larger question about whether 'pcomplete-here-using-help' is doing this in the right way. Maybe instead of returning a list of candidates with text properties for annotations and such, it should instead return a programmed completion table that specifies an 'annotation-function' for the table's metadata. However, that's both a much more invasive change, and I think we'd still want this patch to help improve other parts of completion tables. For example, with this patch, 'completion-table-merge' could annotate which table each candidate is from, and then we could resolve the FIXME in that function.)
0001-Forward-completion-text-properties-when-using-comple.patch
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