Features/ModularizedBashCompletion

= Modularized Bash-Completion =

Summary
Modularize bash-completion package.

Owner

 * Name: Behdad Esfahbod
 * Email: besfahbo@redhat.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 12
 * Last updated: 2009-06-05
 * Percentage of completion: 20%

Bash-completion is the niftiest thing since Fedora itself. The implementation sucks though: Every interactive shell sources 200kb of shell scripts and keeps it in memory, consuming lots of memory, slowing startup down, and cluttering "set" output. We'll modularize it to make it both more maintainable and more efficient.

Detailed Description
See bug 475229 for details.

Benefit to Fedora
Reduced memory consumption: currently any interactive shell takes 200kb to load completion commands. It also takes considerable time (0.3 seconds?!). These are perhaps two reasons why bash-completion is not installed by default. We'll fix these.

Scope
Bash needs to be extended to add a "catch-all" completion handler. That's tracked in bug 475229.

We also need to modularize the bash-completion package. There's an external project for that already here. We need to work with them to make it use the "catch-all" handler when available.

How To Test
TBD.

User Experience
TBD.

Dependencies
None.

Contingency Plan
Stay with current bash-completion package.

Documentation
None.

Release Notes
TBD.

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Features/ModularizedBashCompletion