Separate packages for completion scripts?

Separate packages for completion scripts?

[Adam Dinwoodie]

Seeking opinions from other package maintainers: is it desirable to have
Bash (et al.) completion scripts as part of the main package they're
associated with, or should they be packaged separately?

Currently, the two packages I maintain (fzf and Git) both have separate
packages for their Bash completion scripts.  For Git, that was the
behaviour when I adopted the package, and for fzf I copied the example
set by Git.

Looking now, the only other package that has its Bash completion script
as a separate install to the main package is dbus; everything else just
includes the completion scripts as pant of the main package.[0]

I'm thinking about this in the context of packaging Ag, which also has a
Bash completion script, and I'm thinking including it in the main
package is the easiest option, both from my perspective and from an
end-user perspective.  The only disadvantages I can think of are for
people who definitely don't want the completion script even though they
do want the tool and they do want the rest of bash-completion, but I
could well believe that's an empty set.

Does anyone here have any preferences or opinions?  I'm currently
thinking I'll package Ag's completion script in the main package, and
look at rolling the other completion scripts into the main package when
I get around to switching to use pkg-config to get the relevant
directory names.

[0]: https://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi?grep=etc%2Fbash_completion.d%5C%7Cusr%2Fshare%2Fbash-completion%2Fcompletions&arch=x86_64

Re: Separate packages for completion scripts?

[Andrew Schulman]

> Seeking opinions from other package maintainers: is it desirable to have
> Bash (et al.) completion scripts as part of the main package they're
> associated with, or should they be packaged separately?

It seems simpler and completely reasonable to me to include the completion
scripts as part of the main package.

I agree that it must be rare for someone to want bash-completion and some
other package, but not the bash completion for that package.  Many more
people will be inconvenienced by having to install a separate
foo-completion package.

Andrew