Bash Completion Team
Proposal: ''Drop Bash 2 Support''
Git branch bash-completion-2 is targetted at bash >= 3.2.25. Bash 3.2.25 happens to be the minimal bash version on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and derivatives. Debian-5.0.3 has 3.2.39.
Rationale
Bash 2.x is already quite old.
There are no team members actively testing with bash < 3.2.25.
Moving to support bash >= 3.2.25 only would enable taking full advantage of features introduced in it.
The majority of users is using bash >= 3.2.25, and bash < 3.2.25 users can rely on bash_completion-1. The bugs/improvements to be done for bash >= 3.2.25 weigh heavier then putting energy in keeping bash_completion-2 work on bash 3.0 - 3.2.24.
Details
New interesting things in bash 3.0:
-o plusdirs
Using this would probably enable us to drop _filedir and _filedir_xspec altogether (and the strange self-reading that comes with the latter), see for example https://bugzilla.redhat.com/479936
[[ ... =~ ...]]
Regular expression matching in [[ ... ]]
<<<$foo
- here-strings for command stdin
New interesting things in bash 3.1:
printf -v
- Allows assigning output to a variable without the use of a subshell, making bash_completion use less resources.