Gentoo's way of enabling Bash completion is ugly

[yufw]

I think Gentoo's way of enabling Bash completion is ugly.

Basically, I want tab completion wherever possible. In Ubuntu and Arch, there is a /etc/bash_completion file in the system, the user just needs to source this file and all the completions become available. But in Gentoo, I have to enable completion by hand for every single package.

Of course you can write scripts to enable completion for all the packages at once, the problem is that there is no point to create so many symlinks in the system. Moreover, if the bash-completion package add more supported packages, the user has to enable them by hand and that is pretty distracting.

Why doesn't Gentoo also create a /etc/bash_completion file so the user can easily enable bash completion for all packages?

[Dominique_71]

Gentoo use eselect. That way, you can have separated completion configurations for the system or each user in the system. See Bash: Tab completion. I just updated it a little bit because the example was wrong, and added a last one using eselect to globally enable all the available completions.
_________________
"Confirm You are a robot." - the singularity

[defer-]

I agree. It would be much better if there was one option to enable all bash completions.
_________________
https://github.com/defer-

[xaviermiller]

something like

[steveL]

Yeah looking at that method to enable all bash-completions, it's fragile, and a file in /etc that people could source, that is not sourced in /etc/bash/bashrc by default, would be more useful. That way the admin can comment out a specific completion for the system by default, if that's what they want to do, and only users who need it source both types, in their ~/.bashrc.

/etc/skel can be used to set that up by default if required, with the ability to turn it off just by commenting out the source of /etc/bash-completion in the subsequently-generated home file.

If we did it like that, there'd be no need for a bash-completion flag, just like there's no need for a flag to install unit-files. So long as it's not enabled by default, there's no issue.

A package installing a bash-completion file would just call an eclass function in post setup, that would add the filename to /etc/bash-completion if this is a new install and the filename is not already there, or if this is an upgrade it's not that hard to write a bash function that checks for an old version's name, and whether it's been commented out already. A bit of work, but nothing major, and much simpler than maintaining the USE flags on every package, from both sides of the equation.

[Maitreya]

I don't get it. The current setup with eselect works just fine for me.

[yufw]

[Maitreya]

[khayyam]

[mv]

Actually, I never understood, too, why the gentoo developers decided for this user-inconvenient way
Quite a while ago (when I did not know that zsh is a much better interactive shell than bash), I had solved the problem by symlinking one directory to the other:
I forgot the paths meanwhile, but eselect just creates symlinks in some directory. So if you just remove that directory and replace it by a symlink to the directory with the completion files, you do not need to enable anything ('though you better avoid calling "eselect bashcomp" from now on - if somebody did not care in writing it, it might not recognize the situation and replace the file by a symlink).

[khayyam]

[TomWij]

Yeah, there are quite some bugs (https://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=bash-completion) and the previous QA team has asked me to mask the newer revision;
nowadays the newer revision is no longer in the Portage tree, it is being worked in an (local?) overlay according to https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477380

[Dominique_71]

Personally, I don't care what the method to enable/disable completion is as long it work and is simple to use. I also thing, as many packages have a completion related USE flag, that when enabled the global default must be on.

As sys admin, I also think the eselect model have at least one obvious advantage on gentoo: it will not force you to use etc-update each time a software update add or remove something in the completion stuffs. It just work without my intervention, and that's a really nice feature
_________________
"Confirm You are a robot." - the singularity

[steveL]

[Ant P.]

I'd much rather have a "only pay for what you use" setup. And by that I mean the useflag should install things on-by-default, and the gazillion files bash-completion installs by default need to be taken outside and shot.

I'm really not going to need apt-get *and* rpm completion on a gentoo machine any time this decade.

[mv]

Usually, if a package has USE=bash-completion, it is a bug or a very old package which has not yet been updated:
Gentoo maintainers have agreed that installing such a tiny file should not invoke a useflag.
In fact, the code for useflag in the gentoo tree takes up more space than the space which is saved by not installing the file.
The only exception, as steveL said, is if the package would change something else (e.g. compile an additional tool) if bash-completion is enabled. To be honest, I doubt that such a case exists, i.e. if you see a current package with USE=bash-completion, this is probably a bug.

USE-flags should not change the default which is set up with eselect: eselect exists for a reason and not to be overridden accidentally.

[khayyam]

[jimmij]

[mv]