[Bash-completion-devel] multiple directories in BASH_COMPLETION_COMPAT_DIR ?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 11:53 PM, Raphaël Droz <raphael.droz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would you accept a change in the way BASH_COMPLETION_COMPAT_DIR is
> handled (eg colon-separated paths list ?) or any alternative solution
> for this ?

BASH_COMPLETION_COMPAT_DIR is backwards compatibility stuff we want
eventually to go away. And I think that stuff should stay as is until
it does. Moreover, we don't want to encourage using load time sourcing
of completion snippets these days, and that's stuff the compat dir is
for. The profile.d snippet we ship contains a hook to load
~/.config/bash_completion, and you can do whatever you like in it, for
example load completions. At that time bash_completion has not been
sourced though which might or might not be a problem.

However, being able to install user specific completions dynamically
is a valid use case, so I'd be open to patches for that. I think the
user dir should be
${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/bash-completion and have the same
dir structure as /usr/share/bash-completion, i.e. have completions and
helpers subdirs. User installed completions and helpers should take
precedence over system installed ones.