Subject: Re: meson: Installing completions

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2025 11:58:49 +0200

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 11:46:01PM -0700, Akshay Hegde wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I found some extra time today so I thought I'd try moving my git
> install over to using the new meson build system. Everything went
> surprisingly smoothly, which I really appreciated, so thank you!

great, thanks for testing!

> However, one thing that confused me was that the completions were never
> installed automatically as part of `meson install`, even though
> I specified them under the '-Dcontrib' option.
> 
> I just wanted to double check if I'm supposed to install them manually,
> or if I missed enabling some options (I looked through the top-level
> meson_options.txt and meson.build files and I don't think I did.)

For now the status quo is that you have to install them manually, which
indeed isn't optimal. It matches our Makefile, which never installed
those completions, either. But that by itself isn't a good enough
argument from my perspective that it needs to be the same with Meson.

The biggest question though is whether distros are aligned enough for us
to provide standard installation paths. That is, do all distros end up
installing bash completion into "/usr/share/bash-completion"? What are
the desired directories for tcsh and zsh completion?

If there is enough standardization then yes, I totally think we should
start installing completion scripts automatically.

Patrick