[Bash-completion-devel] Bug#648319: Bug#648319: bash-completion: /etc/bash_completion script doesn't do the job

[Ville Skyttä]

On 2012-01-11 21:30, David Paleino wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:59:19 +0200, Ville Skyttä wrote:
>>
>> First, the readlink command does not exist everywhere.
> 
> Since it's part of the "coreutils" package in Debian, I supposed it existed on
> all Linuxes. Surely I don't know about other Unices though (Solaris, *BSD, ...).
> If this is really true, then maybe we/I should find an alternative (considered
> that Debian also offers a BSD kernel).

It is really true, I didn't say it just to cause trouble.  Solaris boxes
I have access to don't have it, and POSIX doesn't mention a utility by
that name.

>> Second, I don't think it's at all clear that if someone loads
>> bash_completion through a symlink, (s)he wouldn't want the completions
>> dir to be found relative to the symlink but rather whatever the symlink
>> points to.
> 
> Do we really want to support that? Wasn't that line intended to facilitate
> upstream development?

It's not at all clear to me what you mean by "that", or "that line".
I'm just saying that before this patch, completions were always loaded
from a dir relative to the sourced bash_completion, no matter if it was
a symlink or not (so we did in fact support "that" if I guessed right
what you meant by "that").  Now they no longer necessarily are, I don't
think there was anything wrong with the old behavior, and the new
behavior is obviously causing problems -- at least the readlink
availability one, and it can be also argued that the previous behavior
was fine and the new is not.  And I don't see what the symlinking has to
do with upstream development.

Since this is an upstream issue (I guess Debian will have to implement
something like the readlink anyway for backwards compatibility reasons),
I suggest we continue this discussion somewhere else than at
bugs.debian.org.