It's certainly possible that the bash-completion package worked differently in the past and so your old ~/.bashrc doesn't work with it now.

Okay, let's go with that then. Even Debian has issues when you upgrade between versions as opposed to doing an installation from fresh.

Is it possible that in the previous major release of Devuan these problems I mentioned were present and have been carried across to my current setup?

It's certainly possible that the bash-completion package worked differently in the past and so your old ~/.bashrc doesn't work with it now.

I admit defeat - all I will say is I think that these issues arose because I have been using Devuan for a while so gone through at least one upgrade cycle.

Is it possible that in the previous major release of Devuan these problems I mentioned were present and have been carried across to my current setup?

I do not have anything related to bash-completion in my .profile or .bashrc

How about in /etc/skel/.bashrc? It should be the final stanza in that file and that file should be copied to $HOME when your user is created.

I don't think so.

I note that on Debian it does automatically insert the code you quoted into .bashrc when you install the package.

What a strange issue...

there is still nothing in .profile.

I did

apt-get install --reinstall bash-completion

but there is still nothing in .profile.

Yes, if I ctrl-alt-f1, login and try tabbing out commands then completion works fine.

It doesn't work on the desktop because SLiM doesn't read ~/.profile or /etc/profile{,.d/*}.

This bit:

# enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable
# this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile
# sources /etc/bash.bashrc).
if ! shopt -oq posix; then
  if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
    . /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
  elif [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
  fi
fi

Uncomment which section?

Thanks

EDIT: un-comment the section in ~/.bashrc (for just your user) or /etc/bash.bashrc (for all users).

git chec***tab***

Then nothing. Same for

apt-get inst***tab***

I note that this is solved by doing

. /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/git

or

. /etc/bash_completion

but why is this not setup by default when you install the bash-completion package? Surely one of these scripts should automatically be run when opening bash?