[Bash-completion-devel] Bits from the Bash-Completion Team

[David Paleino]

Hi,
this mail is being sent to you as you showed interest in helping the
development of the bash-completion project. If you're no more interested,
please state so replying to this mail, and you won't receive any further
communication from us.

If you're interested in helping the team, you can just start triaging bugs and
filing patches to the Debian BTS. If you really want to get your hands dirty,
first get an account on Alioth [0], the free software hosting facility provided
by Debian, and, once logged in, request membership for the project
bash-completion [1]. You will get write access to the bzr repository.

A bit of "recent history" now :)

We completely merged the upstream code with Ubuntu's and Debian's one, since we
are now going to be upstream ourselves. This also means interfacing with other
distributions, but this point will probably be discussed when it's needed.
Also, we can't "forward" bugs to upstream anymore, so brainstorm to find a
solution when needed ;)

Now, seriously. You can get the current development branch (just called
"current"), which is the result of the source code merge, from our bzr
repository hosted on Alioth:

$ bzr checkout sftp://<username>@bzr.debian.org/bzr/bash-completion/current bash-completion

where <username> will be your username on Alioth (<something>-guest, if you're
not a DD). This way you will have write access to the repository.

Some general rules for committing: document *everything* you do in
debian/changelog. This way it'll be easier to track changes (i.e. not to have
headaches looking inside the code). We should write down some guidelines
though, since debian/changelog would not be present in "upstream releases" we
will make.

A general rule for completion code: bash-completion has always integrated
patches in its main code. What we (me and Luk) would like to achieve is to have
completion provided by *single* *packages*, not by bash-completion (which would
then be just a backend). Example: completion for mount and umount would go into
the "mount" package, which would install the respective files
into /etc/bash_completion.d/ .

You can find a rough webpage at [2]: please don't blame me (David), since it's
just a draft, with general info, but we should really take care also of it.

This seems all for now. Feel free to reply, and, more importantly, give
suggestions. We're just starting, and we need ideas :)

Take care,
David Paleino
Bash-Completion Team

[0] http://alioth.debian.org
[1] http://alioth.debian.org/project/request.php?group_id=100114
[2] http://bash-completion.alioth.debian.org

-- 
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