Comment 18 for bug 103929

On Sun, 06 Apr 2008 09:59:19 -0000, "Micah Cowan"
<email address hidden> said:
> > What would be a suitable mechanism for turning it off if desired?
>
> I'd still vote for commenting it out. It's a skeleton .bashrc file;
> the user is expected to customize it. IIRC, bash-completion is handled
> in this way.
>
> I think a shell var conditional just wastes time on a conditional,
> both for those that want the functionality, and those that don't. It's
> not really a feature people will be toggling frequently.

But if it's a complex conditional and/or complex pieces of interacting
code snippets all over the file, it's easy to screw up, and likely to
contain bugs, and likely to change in future releases of Ubuntu.
Ideally, the user should not have to backport bug fixes from the skel
file when they upgrade their system, and so, I think it's an important
desideratum that you can simply source /etc/skel/.bashrc from your own
.bashrc and still customize or override some parts of it.

It's not like one environment variable more is going to matter much for
a user who already uses bash-completion, which heavily pollutes the
environment with complex internal completion functions.

At least on Gutsy, completion is enabled by default.

/* era */

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