Building a new ZSH module outside the ZSH source tree

[tetsujin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi there, I'm working on a library called "Shell-Pepper" - the idea is
to provide some added functionality to multiple different shells via
loadable modules (when it's necessary or at least beneficial to do so)
and shell scripts...

Anyway, so far the library has just a few commands (some of which are
already provided as part of zsh - I think it's pretty cool that zsh
already provides a module for connecting to Unix Domain Sockets) - and
so far, only for Bash and Korn Shell. It seems like zsh has a fairly
nice programming interface for modules, but I'm not really clear on
the process for building a module without tying it into the zsh build
system.

In particular, the only examples of zsh modules I have are part of the
zsh distribution, in Src/Modules. Each one includes C source and  a
module description file (.mdd) - and sometime during the build,
Src/Modules/Makefile and Makefile.in are generated, and the contents
of these (particularly the generation of module.mdh and module.epro)
are a bit arcane. I can copy the example module and create another zsh
module in zsh/Src/Modules, and build it. But because shell-pepper is
aiming to support multiple shells, a lot of its functionality is
factored out into a "common" build directory. I'm not sure it quite
fits into this build model, and I'd rather stick to the model I've got
anyway - feed the location of the build trees for the different shells
into my build system and build from my project tree.

So I don't really know if there's been much call in the past for
building ZSH modules outside the ZSH source tree, I don't know if
there's a good solution for this at this point. But if somebody on the
list could help me out with this, I'd appreciate it.

---GEC