>>> An "official" fix assumes that there is "production" usage with
>>> clear consensus, which is unlikely to ever happoen imho.
>> 
>> At least the bash-requires.patch (which is applied to bash) seems to
>> be semi-official, as rpm uses it by default. Do you know where this
>> patch (originally) comes from? 
>> 
> 
> The patch originally comes from Ken Estes, then a build master
> @mail.com, sometime like 1999. See the bash changelog, I snuck his
> patch into the RedHat bash at my first opportunity.
> 
> Many ideas for rpm, including foo(bar) dependency name spaces,
> dependencies attached to files,
> per-interpreter for perl (and other) automagic dependency extractors,
> originally came from Ken. 
> 
> I was very surprised to see that the patch had survived in bash in
> early 2005, all those efforts are due to Tim Waugh's very careful
> maintenance. 
> 
> Dmitri Levin of ALT Linux added some improvements to the patch, so I
> added the execute(...) dependency name space in the spring of 2006.
> 
> All this from memory, I can easily be off by a year or 3. See
> changelogs and cvs for accurate dates.

all fine, but I really wouldn't consider it standard;
on hearing about this the other day I quickly checked
Mandriva and Opensuse, and neither one of them have it.