Re: PATCH: custom zsh hooks (was Re: Extending zsh hooks)

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 11:17 AM Gregory Seidman
<gsslist+zshdev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> My one-line-plus-documentation patch is below. The proposal is to
> have a way to add custom hook types to be managed with add-zsh-hook.

The doc paragraph preceding the one you edited says:
  Several functions ... are automatically called at specific points during
  shell execution.

This patch would introduce a new reserved parameter name; the arrays
thereby managed are obviously not related to any other
automatically-called function; and extending the list of hook names in
this way introduces the possibility of name conflicts with actual new
hook functions that might be added in the future.

I think we need some more justification for why this should be
enshrined in the official sources, and for why it should overload
add-zsh-hook rather than be its own new function.  The options-parsing
part of add-zsh-hook is already duplicated in add-zle-hook-widget, so
either there's no issue with duplicating it again, or it's a candidate
for being pulled out into its own function and then called from both
of those and a third new one (or just rewritten using zparseopts,
since getopts/OPTIND handling is a bit iffy [cf. README for changes
5.8.1 to 5.9]).

If a new function is introduced, I would suggest basing it on
add-zle-hook-widget rather than on add-zsh-hook, because
add-zle-hook-widget uses zstyle rather than array parameters and
thereby doesn't clutter the parameter namespace.  (That assumes you
want something mostly backward compatible, because going forward this
could all use namespaces.)