Thanks Jani. I've just looked at the bash-completion formula on Homebrew.
It says that bash-completion 2.0 and above needs bash4, but the current
version of OSX, 10.9, still has bash 3.2, which is why, at least under
Homebrew, we can't update bash-completion to the latest version.

I think your patch probably makes sense. Once a user updates to a newer
bash-completion, it will just begin working, while for users like me, the
error message goes away.


On 2 February 2014 13:54, Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 02 Feb 2014, Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> wrote:
> > The trivial "fix" patch would likely just check for the existence of
> > _init_completion, and refuse to complete without it. For anything
> > fancier, patches welcome...
>
> The patch below would get rid of the error message (and completion, for
> that matter) when _init_completion is not present.
>
> I'm not sure whether this is the way to go, or should we rather check
> for a recent enough bash-completion during configure, or
> recommend/suggest it, or what. The error message does tell us what's
> wrong, although it's annoying for the user (probably more so than just
> not completing).
>
> BR,
> Jani.
>
>
>
> diff --git a/completion/notmuch-completion.bash
> b/completion/notmuch-completion.bash
> index 0f13204..0c457a8 100644
> --- a/completion/notmuch-completion.bash
> +++ b/completion/notmuch-completion.bash
> @@ -384,6 +384,10 @@ _notmuch()
>  {
>      local _notmuch_commands="compact config count dump help insert new
> reply restore search setup show tag"
>      local arg cur prev words cword split
> +
> +    # require bash-completion with _init_completion
> +    type -t _init_completion >/dev/null 2>&1 || return
> +
>      _init_completion || return
>
>      COMPREPLY=()
>