It's not that clear cut, for example the yum-utils completions use pkg-config at "runtime" to pull in the required yum completion functions if they're not available yet.

There probably is a prettier way for yum-utils to accomplish the same without needing pkg-config (for example using bash-completion's _xfunc()), and yum and yum-utils are being phased out, but simply going ahead with would cause breakage, so at the moment it's a no go alone.

I'm also questioning the necessity to some extent; as far as I can tell, the only dependency in the tree that the *.pc in the main package causes is pkgconfig, and that's roughly a ~120kB package. If the goal is to have a really minimized setup, I wonder why would bash-completion itself be something to include there in such setups (it's ~900kB installed).

Leaving open but not sure if anything will happen to this soon.

Note that the yum-utils completions are not shipped with bash-completion but with yum-utils itself, nor (as you noted) is yum-utils part of a base install.

Sure, that was the thing I was addressing by saying "it's a no go alone" (meaning doing it in bash-completion only without touching other packages that would be affected/broken by the change).

What does a "base install" mean, and is bash-completion included in it? It is included in the standard and desktop comps groups.

(In reply to Ville Skyttä from comment #1)
> I'm also questioning the necessity to some extent; as far as I can tell, the
> only dependency in the tree that the *.pc in the main package causes is
> pkgconfig, and that's roughly a ~120kB package. If the goal is to have a
> really minimized setup, I wonder why would bash-completion itself be
> something to include there in such setups (it's ~900kB installed).

Fair enough, and I finally managed to track this down; dnf Recommends: bash-completion.  Now that we have an option to exclude weak deps in kickstarts (bug 1133110), bash-completion no longer appears in the base image.

That being said, bash-completion.pc technically still belongs in a separate -devel package, per the Packaging Guidelines.  If a particular third-party completion uses pkg-config (e.g. gstreamer1 or yum-utils), then it should add a weak dep thereon.

(In reply to Yaakov Selkowitz from comment #4)
> That being said, bash-completion.pc technically still belongs in a separate
> -devel package, per the Packaging Guidelines.

The packaging guidelines actually acknowledge that it depends on the use case, and in my opinion this is a valid one for having it in the main package. Closing as WONTFIX based on that.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Pkgconfig_Files_.28foo.pc.29

(In reply to Ville Skyttä from comment #1)
> It's not that clear cut, for example the yum-utils completions use
> pkg-config at "runtime" to pull in the required yum completion functions if
> they're not available yet.

That is a reason for yum-utils to depend on pkg-config, not for bash-completion.  See the summary of this bug.  *.pc files should go to a sub-package that is not installed by default.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1457164 ***