Hi Chet,
I'm consolidating my replies to your replies in this email.
Before I start, a note: I'm a Debian developer, but I'm not the Debian
maintainer of bash. I'm just helping cleaning up 25 years of Debian
packaging cruft. :) In this moment I'm going through the current set of
patches shipped by Debian since time immemorial to understand which can
be integrated, which should be dropped, and which should be updated to
the latest Debian patching guidelines (DEP-3).
On 22/09/25 17:16, Chet Ramey wrote:
On 9/22/25 10:19 AM, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
Hi, this patchset contains a bunch of old documentation fixes and
improvements that have been shipped in Debian's bash since more or
less forever (the first patch is from 1999).
I hope that these patches can be integrated "as is" or that they
can serve as starting points for discussions about possible
additional documentation.
Why are you sending these again?
As Brenden suggested, that was a revision of the original patchset,
modified to use Branden's choice of words.
I did in fact use `git send-email`, Linux kernel style, to send these
patches. Please let me know if there is a better way to send sets of
patches for bash.
## [PATCH 1/7] doc: Document interaction between `exec` and redirections
On 22/09/25 17:28, Chet Ramey wrote:
I'm satisfied with the language in the current man page, which is
"When used with the exec builtin, redirections modify file handles in
the current shell execution environment."
I see. So you would prefer to see this additional remark removed from
Debian's version of bash, right?
## [PATCH 2/7] doc/bash.1: Document deprecated syntax for arithmetic
evaluation
On 22/09/25 17:56, Chet Ramey wrote:
I think we're going to leave this undocumented and discouraged.
Well, nobody will know that the `$[]` syntax is discouraged if it is not
documented. :)
And "undocumented" will it not be, since it is present in bash(1) in
Debian and all Debian's derivatives. That includes also plenty of
websites generated from those man pages.
What would be the downside of acknowledging this deprecated syntax in
the Bash's documentation?
## [PATCH 3/7] doc/bash.1: Mention quoting when assigning to FIGNORE
On 22/09/25 17:31, Chet Ramey wrote:
The added text doesn't align with the example, which does not need
quoting. Can you show an example where the tilde expansion might
matter?
Following the reasoning of <https://bugs.debian.org/115290>,
CDPATH The search path for the cd command. This is a
colon-separated list of directories […] A sample value is
“.:~:/usr”
$ CDPATH=.:~:/usr
$ echo $CDPATH
.:/home/gioele:/usr # What one would expect
FIGNORE A colon-separated list of suffixes to ignore when performing
filename completion […] A sample value is “.o:~”
$ FIGNORE=.o:~
$ echo $FIGNORE
.o:/home/gioele # Not what one would expect
## [PATCH 4/7] doc/bash.1: Document role of LC_COLLATE in case
insensitive pathname expansion
On 22/09/25 17:35, Chet Ramey wrote:
I think the existing text describing the behavior of range
expressions is sufficient. This paragraph describes the effect of the
shell options.
I can see adding some text referencing globasciiranges to that
section.
I agree that is the wrong place to talk about that peculiarity of
non-ascii ranges. But that specific issue ("[a-z] may match upcase
characters") is IMO problematic enough to deserve a mention in the manual.
## [PATCH 5/7] builtins/test: Document that file expressions act on the
symlink target
On 22/09/25 17:37, Chet Ramey wrote:
This is already specified in the man page and info file. Does it need
to be in the help text as well?
Why not? It does seem like an important piece of information (that's why
it is in the man page in the first page).
## [PATCH 6/7] builtins/test: Document handling of parameters
On 22/09/25 17:42, Chet Ramey wrote:
I think the existing text in the man page and info file
"The test and [ commands determine their behavior based on the number
of arguments; see the descriptions of those commands for any
other command-specific actions."
is sufficient. The help text for `test' already says
"The behavior of test depends on the number of arguments. Read the
bash manual page for the complete specification."
After reading the associated bug report, I'd tend to agree with you.
Maybe this patch should be dropped from Debian.
## [PATCH 7/7] doc/bash.1: Document -v/-x options
On 22/09/25 17:15, Chet Ramey wrote:
I think the existing documentation covers this.
It does by referring to `set`, but `-v` and `-x` are common options that
IMO should be highlighted in the man page.
Regards,
--
Gioele Barabucci
