Re: updating development versions and Re: bug in FAQ

[Oliver Kiddle <opk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Stephenson wrote:

> It ought to be possible to send it automatically (or at least via a
> script which just needs the version) to ftp.zsh.org, which will avoid

If someone does get some automatic thing working, it'd be nice to have
bzip2 compressed files aswell, particularly as this brings the total
size down enough to fit on a floppy. Incidentally, the source as taken
from CVS seems to be quite a bit smaller - what does it lack (other than
configure).

> Oliver, if you're interested in maintaining web pages, we could do
> with something basic on sourceforge, so if you want to register, Adam
> or I can add you as a developer.  Links to the other zsh websites and
> to some zsh resources within sourceforge would be useful, though
> there's no reason why this shouldn't all be available at
> sunsite.auc.dk (some of it obviously already is).  The current general
> web page (rather than the sourceforge-specific stuff) is just a
> placeholder.  I don't think there's any arrangement for CVS handling
> of web pages at sourceforge.

That sounds fine - though I would hope to have things arranged at some
point so the main web pages can be kept up-to-date. If anyone has any
suggestions related to what can go on these sourceforge pages then get
back to me. It looks like Adam has added me now on sourceforge - thanks.
I think we should look at consolidating the web pages into one area at
some point - we seem to have it all in several places at the moment. We
should atleast have one clear home page - I don't think it matters to
have the mailing list archive elsewhere for example. As Adam points out,
it is not ideal that the main page is only a list of pointers. Who owns
and pays for zsh.org? We could get a Christmas Island domain for free
(zsh.cx). It may be easier to have the main web pages at sourceforge.

Has anyone found out where the compile farm thing is - I'd guess it is a
shell account on a variety of systems. It'd be nice if they got some
suns, rs/6000s and sgis for us to test builds on.

Adam Spiers wrote:

>   If you have zsh in a subdirectory mytt(bin) of your home directory,
>   put this in .profile:
>               ^^^^^^^^

> I tried this in order to get my default shell on zsh.sourceforge.net
> to be the one in /home/groups/zsh/bin, but it doesn't work.  If I make
> it .zprofile however, I just get an endless loop, and the SF guys
> probably aren't too keen on fork bombs, even linear ones :-)

What I often do is set my shell to /bin/sh and exec zsh from my
.profile. That avoids any endless loops and has the advantage that only
the small bourne shell is used for non-interactive shells. The trouble
on Linux systems is that /bin/sh is bash so is little smaller than zsh
(if not bigger due to zsh's dynamic modules). I think the FAQ entry is
really intended for people who can't change their shell because chsh has
been removed by the sysadmin.

I was about to suggest that you check $SHLVL but I don't think that gets
incremented if you exec zsh. The best might be to change your shell to
ksh or csh (this is what I've done on sourceforge). Make sure that you
do a bit of checking in the .profile before execing a zsh. As you might
imagine, I had lots of fun trying to salvage my account at university
once when my home directory was moved, along with the version of tcsh
that was my default shell at the time.

Oliver