[Bash-completion-devel] Bug#498474: Bug came back...

[Lucio Crusca]

On Friday 24 October 2008 22:02:35 David Paleino wrote:
> As I already explained to you all, bash-completion doesn't work when BASH
> is called as /bin/sh, it's intended. You *MUST* call it as /bin/bash.

If I call bash as /bin/sh I'm using a sh-compatible bash, so, as the package 
name implies, bash-completion can't work, but the problem is that it outputs 
garbage and renders the whole /bin/sh hard to use. That way, one cannot have 
bash-completion installed and use /bin/sh as shell for a few users, without 
also tweaking some other configuration file for each user to manually disable 
bash-completion ($HOME/.profile in particular). Moreover, the useradd command 
creates users with /bin/sh as default shell, and that's the way I ended up 
with /bin/sh without even realizing it.

However now I think it's a problem in the bash package itself, because it 
installs a /etc/skel/.profile that has a broken bash test, imho:

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then

I don't really know the intent of that test, however it detects a bash 
launched as /bin/sh as a common bash, because the BASH_COMPLETION variable is 
defined also when bash is run as /bin/sh. Then it sources .bashrc, which in 
turn sources bash_completion scripts.

Should we forward this bug to bash?

Lucio.