[Bashdb-devel] Upcoming changes for potential Debian release

[R. B. <ro...@pa...>]

Folks: 

At my urging, Matthias Klose, a Debian bash maintainer, has been
looking at making this project industrial-strength enough for Debian
inclusion. As a result, there has been a flurry of activity since the
0.41 release. The presumption is that a number of configuration and
build bugs have recently been (or will be) fixed.

A stumbling block that most people run into in trying to make a
distribution release is that the this project doesn't build outside of
the source tree. A number of changes in CVS are related to that.

Another common comment is that the debugger include files (which I had
thought of as analogous to a script library) currently install
somewhere under "lib", whereas I'm told a more natural convention is
to install under "share."  The current configurability of making this
change is lacking at least in the bashdb script if not also the bash
program and probably inside the configuration system as well.

Mikael Andersson who expressed a desire to make gentoo distribution,
noted, and I believe he's done some work towards addressing this in
the code.

Something else I guess I will address sooner than later is the lack of
a manual page. Right now my plan is to write one in perlpod (rather
than troff). A suggestion was use texi2pod and then pod2man, but I'd
rather just write in perlpod and skip the texi2pod step. If someone
has another tool or suggestion, let me know.

Matthias Klose also mentioned a possible deficiency in using the GNU
Free Documentation License (GFDL) for the bashdb manual this link
  http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
suggests that GPL is a better thing to use. Anyone know anything about
this?

Finally, the question has arisen here and elsewhere as to what to call
the bash-2.05b executable that has been modified to improve error
reporting and debugging support (and also now timestamps the history
file which I think essential if you use bash as your root shell).  I
suggested bash+dbg; Matthias Klose has chosen the name bash-bashdb
since there already is a bash-minimal and a bash-static in
Debian. Going in a completely different direction, some friends have
been urging me to call the project "rebash." I think this is a catchy
name.  After all, "bash" is the "Bourne-Again Shell" so this is the
"ReBourne-Again shell." Also sounds like "Rebok" and just the name
"rebash" is appropriate for the same reason that "bash" was a bash of
"sh". 

As always, I solicit comments and thoughts of any of the matters
above.

Thanks.