[Pkg-zsh-devel] Bug#1101675: Bug#1101675: zsh: completion suddenly broken

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2025 at 04:51:22PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>I'm removing the "upstream" tag, because at
>
>  https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete/issues/491#issuecomment-2774459991
>
>the upstream author says:
>
>  Argcomplete does not activate global completion by default and does
>  not recommend that distributions activate it by default. Global
>  completion is meant to be activated by the user. I am not a Debian
>  maintainer, and I don't have any control over the choices that
>  Debian package maintainers make when modifying the installation
>  routine of this package.
>
>So, in short, such completions must not be enabled by default for zsh
>in Debian.
>
>A bit more details:
>
>Though the main issue introduced by the latest version 3.6.1 has now
>been fixed upstream (in 3.6.2), the previous versions were already
>badly interfering with user settings, and it was nearly impossible
>for the user to easily find the cause. In my case, removing the
>python3-argcomplete package (which had been installed automatically
>via a "Recommends:" dependency) made issues I got in the past months
>disappear; I hadn't reported them earlier because they were occurring
>only on one of my machines and I wasn't able to find the cause.
>
>There have been complaints about this package at least for Arch Linux,
>where the global completion (i.e. changing the "-default-" completer)
>was enabled by default like in Debian. Such completions have then been
>removed in Arch Linux.
>
>See also:
>  https://www.zsh.org/mla/workers/2025/msg00129.html

While I don't have any specific disagreement with anything you say here, 
I'm reluctant to unilaterally revert what was apparently a deliberate 
change in response to a user request (see 
https://bugs.debian.org/944469) so close to the trixie freeze, 
particularly when I've really just been doing drive-by maintenance of 
this package.

Could you please file a separate bug report about this, and CC the 
reporter and fixer of #944469?  We can then discuss whether e.g. the 
completions are appropriate for bash but not zsh, or should be made 
non-default again across the board, or something else.

To deal with the remainder of this bug, I'll upgrade to 3.6.2, which 
should at least be fairly non-controversial.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at debian.org]