Re: Official plugin manager?

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bart wrote:
> It has been our long-standing practice to recommend that package
> builders/installers do NOT create /etc/z* files, or make them minimal,
> so as not to interfere with users own initialization files.  Maybe
> it's time to relax that, or at least to provide a suggested skeleton

A packaged system-wide zshrc is not the same thing as a skeleton zshrc.
The recommendation should stand for the former. A skeleton zshrc,
meaning a file that is copied from, e.g. /etc/skel/.zshrc to a new
user's home directory by useradd is not something I'd
discourage. 

> zshrc -- which we could connect to zsh-newuser-install to be slurped
> in without having to go through all the questions if you just want to
> "feel lucky".

I've never been especially fond of the newuser feature but that's
mainly because of the periodic irritation of having to read how to
quit it when using a blank account. If it discourages distributions
from including skeleton files, then that isn't great. Perhaps it
could just print a helpful message, autoload functions for invoking
things like setup widgets and prompt theme selectors, do some minimal
setup like enabling completion and then give you an actual prompt.

For a setup widget, using zcurses and colour for something more visual
and interactive might be more approachable. But I wouldn't want that
invoked automatically.

> I've been noodling with a default completion setup module for a while
> (though haven't worked on it in months) and we could certainly do a
> better job of exposing the prompt theme system since pretty prompts
> apparently are what many people go looking at OMZ to find.

We might also want to reconsider the actual themes. They all predate
vcs_info and unicode. Meddling with PROMPT_CR and PROMPT_SP seems
unhelpful while the state of TRANSIENT_RPROMPT is sooner an aspect of
the actual prompt. The prompts do some nice things that are not obvious
to a casual observer, e.g. getting signal names from the return status
(clint/zefram) and the conditional newline (oliver). What's popular
in the OMZ world is whatever looks cool even if you have to install
modified fonts to make them work.

As for an official plugin manager, I think the idea has merits. I
brought the idea up in users/22179 but there was little enthusiasm
then. And I had different problems in mind than those outlined by
Sebastian: for all its popularity and multitudes of "contributors",
OMZ has a quality problem. Contributions are largely forgotten once
accepted because ownership is transferred. They don't make good use of
autoloading, possibly run compinit more than once with changed $fpath
and don't seem to encourage the use of things like add-zsh-hook. The
plugin standard and documentation of it determines those things.

Oliver