Default fpath

[Oliver Kiddle <opk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not convinced that the current situation with respect to zsh setting
up the fpath to point to all the directories it installs (plus
site-functions) is the best way of doing it. Note that I use
--enable-function-subdirs with configure.

My .zshrc file contains this:

fpath=( $fpath(N) ~/.zfunc $fpath[1]/* )
typeset -U fpath
for dir in ~/.zfunc(N) $fpath[1]/*
    [[ -d $dir ]] && autoload $dir/[^_]*(.N:t)
autoload -U allopt zed
...
autoload -U compinit
compinit -d

There's a few things I don't like about having to do it this way. They
are more aesthetic than anything else but I still don't like it.

I'm not entirely convinced that putting site-functions in the $fpath is
a good idea. On many installations, it won't exist, some people might
want to put it elsewhere or call it something else and others like me
subdivide it into various subdirectories (Apex, Ada, AIX etc) but don't
put any functions directly in it. I don't like having to use $fpath[1] -
it doesn't seem very clean and I'm relying on it always pointing to
site-functions. I realise that I could search for *site-functions in
$fpath but I don't think I'd like that any better.

The initial fpath contains the Debian and Linux directories despite the
fact that I always remove them after installation. I get rid of them
with the (N) but I don't think they should be there. I suppose that in
the longer term, we'll have to add configure-time checks for these and
other operating systems we might have functions for. 

As a result of $fpath being set to include all the installed function
directories, I have to add directories to $fpath, then loop through the
same duplicated list of directories to autoload any functions. I can't
just loop through all directories in $fpath and autoload everything
because I don't want all the zsh supplied functions in Misc. Many people
upgrading from older zsh or learning about $fpath anew will assign to
$fpath in their .zshrc, clobbering it's current value so I think it is
better if they are only added by compinit.

The other thing which I've never understood is why compinit (and
promptinit) is an autoloaded function: nobody would ever want to run it
more than once in a session so why isn't it just sourced?

What I think would be a better system is if zsh started with an empty
$fpath, compinit was sourced and added any completion function
directories to $fpath. Similarly, promptinit would add the Prompts
directory to $fpath. The one issue here is that we would need a way to
find compinit/promptinit from our setup files. The obvious solution is
to have a variable which is set when zsh first runs such as
$ZSH_FUNCTIONS. In fact, it might be better in the longer term to have
an associative array which points to any compile-time defined
directories. So we would have something like:
ZSH_INSTALL[functions]=/usr/local/share/zsh/$ZSH_VERSION/functions
ZSH_INSTALL[lib]=/usr/local/lib/zsh/3.1.6-dev-19
ZSH_INSTALL[share]=/usr/local/share/zsh
etc.

Oliver Kiddle