Re: Good, easy to use, upstream defaults for zsh (i.e. improving usability)

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 14,  1:03pm, Peter Stephenson wrote:
}
} Bart said most things, but I'm quite happy to consider innovative ideas
} as to how we can arrange for a useful default configuration without
} trashing the system's or the user's zsh initialisation scripts.  This
} isn't an easy problem, and I don't think there's anyway of doing it
} without at least some connivance from system administrators and package
} maintainers.

Here's something that occurred to me:

During startup, if none of the ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.z* files are found,
zsh looks for (but does not complain if it does not find) a "new user"
module, e.g. zsh/newuser, and loads it.

(Or the module could be loaded unconditionally, and the test for whether
the .z* files exist could be part of the module bootup.)

We could provide a default implementation of zsh/newuser that looks
for files in /usr/share/zsh/$VERSION (or the equivalent configure-
time path) and either simply reads them, or copies them to the .z*
locations.  Admins who don't want this could choose not to install
the module, or could provide their own rewrite.