Dear Maintainer,

bash 5.0 introduced a new build-time config-top.h option to allow users
to optionally enable sending the bash history to syslog via a new shopt
variable.
Given it's generally undesirable on user's machines, even if compiled
in the feature is off by default at runtime. It can be checked
trivially with "shopt -p | grep syslog".

But this feature is often necessary and required on mission critical
equipment due to auditing rules®ulations. For example in my case, to
use vanilla Debian on servers inside a large ISP we need this option.
Given Debian aims to be a Universal Operating System, it would be
really great if such option were available without having to rebuild
bash manually. :-)

Please consider the inlined diff for the deb-bash-config.diff patch,
that will build the support but of course will leave it disabled by
default. I have tested it and it works as expected.

Thank you!
--- debian/patches/deb-bash-config.diff
+++ debian/patches/deb-bash-config.diff
@@ -14,6 +14,10 @@
 # DP:
 # DP: - don't define a default DEFAULT_MAIL_DIRECTORY, because it
 # DP:   can cause a timeout on NFS mounts.
+# DP:
+# DP: - build with runtime option to enable sending history to syslog
+# DP:   and disable it by default. Can be enabled by a user with
+# DP:   shopt -s syslog_history

 Index: b/config-bot.h
 ===================================================================
@@ -54,3 +58,21 @@

  /* Define if you want the case-capitalizing operators (~[~]) and the
     `capcase' variable attribute (declare -c). */
+@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@
+
+ /* Define if you want each line saved to the history list in bashhist.c:
+    bash_add_history() to be sent to syslog(). */
+-/* #define SYSLOG_HISTORY */
++#define SYSLOG_HISTORY
+ #if defined (SYSLOG_HISTORY)
+ #  define SYSLOG_FACILITY LOG_USER
+ #  define SYSLOG_LEVEL LOG_INFO
+@@ -128,7 +128,7 @@
+    shell option; if defined, the value is the default for the syslog_history
+    shopt option */
+ #if defined (SYSLOG_HISTORY)
+-/* #define SYSLOG_SHOPT 1 */
++#  define SYSLOG_SHOPT 0
+ #endif
+
+ /* Define if you want to include code in shell.c to support wordexp(3) */

users
shopt
to
syslog
the
bashhist.c:
syslog_history

Dear Maintainer,

Bash 5.0-beta is out - I've just tested it to make sure this patch
still applies and works, and it does.

Would be fantastic if it could be considered for the eventual upload of
5.0-beta.

Thank you!

Dear Maintainer,

bash 5.0-beta2 is out, I've tested the above small patch with it and I
can confirm again that it works as expected. It would be great if it
could be included in the next upload to experimental.

Thank you!

Dear Maintainer,

Just tested with 5.0-rc1 and it works fine as well. rc1 also fixes the
build failures on armhf/armel BTW.

Thanks and happy holidays!