Re: Regression in UTF-8 support

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 28, 11:22am, Peter Stephenson wrote:
}
} On the gripping hand, it's not clear we even need to quote a null in
} a history file, since it's not a set of null-terminated strings.

History files have traditionally had problems with NFS-mounted home
directories when zsh instances on multiple machines are sharing the
files.  A common NFS problem, at least in years past, has been to
dump a bunch of NULs into files when e.g. two processes disagree on
the ftruncate() length.  Presently (IIRC) the zsh history mechanism
discards these unmetafied NULs, which masks a lot of potential idiocy.

Also, zsh history files have long been designed such that they are
compatible with other shells as long as you don't turn on assorted
extended features.  Metafication probably breaks a little of this
already, but unmetafied NULs would abolish it entirely.

However, my biggest objection would be that changing the history file
format would mean that previous versions of zsh would not be able to
share the files with newer versions.