Re: Oh my God! They killed completion! YOU BASTARDS!

[Zoltan Hidvegi <hzoli@xxxxxxxxxx>]

TGAPE! <tgape@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > That's what Etc/NEWS is for.  It needs to be updated for 3.1.
> 
> Documentation's great.  So, who in this group is a documentation
> fanatic?  No one, I see.  That would explain why the documentation is so
> friggin out of date.  Of course, the fact that the documentation is

You can help if you have time.  People develop zsh in their free time for
fun, and it looks like most of them find more fun in coding than in
documentation.  The main documentation, the manual is kept up to date,
and you can get a very nice printed documentation from the texinfo
version.  It's more than a hundred page long with nice indexes and table
of contents.  It's worth reading, even experienced developers can learn
from it.  Unfortunately it is too long and written in the usual Unix
manpage style language which is sometimes hard to read for inexperienced
users.

> Etc/NEWS (or ChangeLog, or whatever) has the problem that it tends to be

ChangeLog is not for the users, it is a log for the developers.  Etc/NEWS
is updated for major releases, but it may lag behind the changes during
the development.  Note that 3.1 is beta, it is under development, and
noone guarantees that it'll work as you expect.  If you chose to use beta
software, you should be prepared for surprises.  The announcement on
zsh-announce did describe the changed options.

> person affected.  When one of my friends upgrades zsh on his machine,
> there are dozens affected, many who aren't necessarily observant enough
> to realize 'Hey, a shell upgrade occurred, and zefram's done an annoying
> default option change on me on some option I'm completely unfamiliar
> with because I immediately dismissed it as a bad idea.'  I've heard
> there's someone at work who can do this to hundreds, and I've seen ISPs
> where they could potentially do it to thousands.

First it was not Zefram but me who changed this with the approval from
most of the people reading zsh-workers at that time.  And if a system
administrator installs a beta software for dezens or maybe thousans of
users, he should have a good reason and then he probably knows how to
handle these issues.  He can set up /etc/zshenv to set the option
preferred by the users.  The default options were changed to make the
shell more usable without playing with options.  Many users did not even
know about these options since they never read the manual.  Of course the
choice of options is a matter of taste, but there seemd to be a consensus
here on the new set.

> people to mention I have little sense.  Still, I agree with him that it
> shouldn't be default.  Just because it's useful doesn't mean that it
> should be set as a trap to the unwary; most people who start using zsh
> are used to other shells which don't do that.

But most people start using zsh exactly because it does things that other
shells don't.  Actually ALWAYS_LAST_PROMPT was one of the main reasons I
started using zsh.  When I saw this behavior, I saw the light :-).

Zoltan