From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 11:48:43 -0500 From: Sweth Chandramouli To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: o'reilly zsh book? Message-ID: <19990125114843.A25900@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailing-List: 2038 On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 05:15:13PM +0100, Peter Stephenson wrote: > I just confirmed this with the sources. Something else I never knew. nor i, until someone asked if it could be done and i went looking. as always, i find myself amazed at what zsh can do, and totally frustrated at the documentation. i've been thinking for a while that what zsh really needs is one of those o'reilly handbooks to be written about it, and more recently, i've come to the conclusion that that probably isn't going to happen anytime soon. except... i've written some tech. docs myself, and done a fair amount of non-tech writing, and for the last week or two have been bouncing arouund the idea of submitting a proposal for a zsh book to o'reilly; the main problem i see with my doing that, however, is that i'm far from the most knowledgeable person about zsh, so most of my zsh tricks come from this list. so i guess my questions are, would anyone else who is more involved in the development side (and thus has a better understanding of the internals) be interested in co-writing an o'reilly zsh book, and would the list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board for any questions that might come up? -- sweth. -- Sweth Chandramouli IS Coordinator, The George Washington University / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F) * From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Bruce Stephens Date: 25 Jan 1999 17:06:18 +0000 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2040 Sweth Chandramouli writes: > as always, i find myself amazed at what zsh can do, and totally > frustrated at the documentation. I'd like to see more tutorial-style documentation. Not just reference material, but something showing me how to use zsh for things I'm likely to want to do. (Aside: one thing that really annoys me is computing magazines comparing Unix command lines to DOS. The DOS command line is crud, but that doesn't imply that all command lines are crud. But if you come to bash or zsh from DOS, then probably you wouldn't see anything other than an irritatingly case-sensitive DOS, simply because you wouldn't know what to do with all the extra stuff.) > i've been thinking for a while that what zsh really needs is one of > those o'reilly handbooks to be written about it, and more recently, > i've come to the conclusion that that probably isn't going to happen > anytime soon. There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how many people use zsh? I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it. > and would the list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board > for any questions that might come up? I don't see a problem in that. Alternatively, you could help to improve the documentation that comes with zsh. That would have the disadvantages that you wouldn't get any money from it, and there wouldn't be a nice printed version (which would be nice). But even if O'Reilly (or whoever) turned down your proposal, you could still contribute to the free documentation. "Linux Programming Tools" has a chapter on zsh, but it's horribly limited. It doesn't even mention things like $(...), which also exist in bash. It's not a bad book, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it as anything other than an imperfect reference book. The Tcl/Tk tables use an invalid syntax, too. From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Bart Schaefer" Message-Id: <990125093222.ZM11938@candle.brasslantern.com> Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 09:32:22 -0800 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailing-List: 2041 On Jan 25, 11:48am, Sweth Chandramouli wrote: > Subject: o'reilly zsh book? > so i guess my questions are, would anyone else who is more involved > in the development side (and thus has a better understanding of the > internals) be interested in co-writing an o'reilly zsh book, and would the > list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board for any questions > that might come up? I've actually been considering the idea. (I work with Bob Glickstein, who wrote ORA's "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" book, and back in the days when I worked with Dan Heller (author of Volume 6 of the X11 series) I even had lunch with Tim to discuss book possibilities. You can almost see Petaluma from my office.) The main reason I've been dragging my feet about making a proposal is that I can't decide what really ought to be in the book. Basic shell usage and the important aspects of scripting are already covered in agonizing detail by ORA's bash and ksh books; aside from a few oddities like "emulate", it just isn't that much different to do those things in zsh. (Intentionally similar, in fact.) So the book would have to be largely about the interactive zsh experience, and would have to progress pretty quickly into the real esoterica. That'd certainly be fun to write, but isn't the kind of thing that sells to a big audience; even Bob's emacs book isn't doing spectacular business, and there are a lot more emacs users than zsh users. An additional detail is that 3.1.x is a fast-moving target at the moment. Several major new features have appeared since roughly early November, and are still mutating towards their final form. Until things stabalize a bit again, a book about zsh esoterica would practically be obsolete before it was even finished. Nevertheless, it could be a worthwhile thing to talk about. Bob's offered to help me put the proposal together if I work out the details. Anybody have any ideas how we might estimate the size of the audience? From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 12:52:22 -0500 From: Sweth Chandramouli To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Message-ID: <19990125125221.A26108@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailing-List: 2042 On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 05:06:18PM +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote: > > i've been thinking for a while that what zsh really needs is one of > > those o'reilly handbooks to be written about it, and more recently, > > i've come to the conclusion that that probably isn't going to happen > > anytime soon. > > There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how > many people use zsh? I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it. that would probably be the hardest selling point. now that zsh is being included in most of the linux distributions, we can't even do something like try to get a count of total number of downloads from all of the mirror sites. does anyone know how other free software packages get estimates of their user base? (for that matter, how many people are on the zsh lists? i think we could assume that anyone on one of the lists is a user.) > Alternatively, you could help to improve the documentation that comes > with zsh. That would have the disadvantages that you wouldn't get any > money from it, and there wouldn't be a nice printed version (which > would be nice). But even if O'Reilly (or whoever) turned down your > proposal, you could still contribute to the free documentation. all of the basic documentation is really already there, although often in very cryptic langauge; even so, as you pointed out earlier, what is really needed is good tutorial info. part and parcel with good examples and tutorials, however, is having a way for someone who wants to do something to easily find it, and that's where i think that having the docs done professionally would be of greatest use: making a really good index. i'd guess that, all told, about a third of the time spent making a really useful set of documentation on zsh would involve just building a good index and cross-referencing everything; a commercial publisher would be far far better at doing something like that than, say, i would. the money isn't much of an issue anyway; the last book i co-authored (sams.net's intranets unleashed, which i can heartily recommend you not waste your money on) was done for free as a favour to my then-employer (who promptly got into a lawsuit with the company who had subcontracted them to help write the book, so that, of the 6 chapters i wrote, none showed up in the final product, while i was given credit for co-authoring a chapter that i had never even seen). for zsh, at least, it would be more a labour of love, or maybe just a labour of lust--i know that i'm just barely scratching the surface of things that zsh can do for me, and having to sit down and write it all up and come up with nifty examples would force me to dig a lot deeper and actually learn everything i want to learn but keep putting off until next week. if there's no book, of course, i would still help out with the docs, but as i just mentioned, i have a huge tendency to put things off unless there are deadlines to be met, which would (for me, at least) be another advantage of doing the docs for a book, rather than "for fun". -- sweth. -- Sweth Chandramouli IS Coordinator, The George Washington University / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F) * From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Bruce Stephens Date: 25 Jan 1999 17:58:10 +0000 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2043 "Bart Schaefer" writes: > An additional detail is that 3.1.x is a fast-moving target at the > moment. Several major new features have appeared since roughly > early November, and are still mutating towards their final form. Yes, and they're pretty crucial areas, too. (For those that aren't on zsh-workers: associative arrays, new syntax for programmable completion, new glob qualifiers for sorting expansions. Probably other stuff I've forgotten. All cool stuff which, once it's stabilised, will be very nice, and exactly the kind of thing that you'd want to be in a book.) > Nevertheless, it could be a worthwhile thing to talk about. Bob's > offered to help me put the proposal together if I work out the > details. Anybody have any ideas how we might estimate the size of > the audience? No. I suspect most Linux distributions ship with zsh. It's on the 1-CD RedHat, for example. But typically the default for new users is bash, so presumably most people will end up using bash. Of other Unices, who can tell? From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: Bruce Stephens Cc: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? From: Matt Armstrong MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: 25 Jan 1999 09:59:48 -0800 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2046 Bruce Stephens writes: > There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how > many people use zsh? I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it. My guess would be a lot fewer than bash or tcsh. Both bash or tcsh are far more likely to be people's default shells. In my company of 120 people or so, I'm the only one who uses zsh. And that was pretty much by accident. I couldn't figure out how to get bash to do what zsh does when you: setopt AutoList setopt AutoMenu setopt ListTypes setopt ListAmbiguous so I went looking for another shell. From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 13:11:15 -0500 From: Sweth Chandramouli To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Message-ID: <19990125131114.B26108@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailing-List: 2044 On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 09:32:22AM -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote: > The main reason I've been dragging my feet about making a proposal is that > I can't decide what really ought to be in the book. Basic shell usage and > the important aspects of scripting are already covered in agonizing detail > by ORA's bash and ksh books; aside from a few oddities like "emulate", it > just isn't that much different to do those things in zsh. (Intentionally > similar, in fact.) > > So the book would have to be largely about the interactive zsh experience, > and would have to progress pretty quickly into the real esoterica. That'd > certainly be fun to write, but isn't the kind of thing that sells to a big > audience; even Bob's emacs book isn't doing spectacular business, and there > are a lot more emacs users than zsh users. i can see lots of space in between what's discussed in the ksh book (don't have the bash book, but the one time i paged through it, it seemed mostly the same) and a book of pure esoterica. i've spent the last month or so, for example, writing ksh scripts to do all sorts of neat post-install tasks on a bunch of sun machines i'm going to be bringing up soon, and the entire time, i was thinking to myself that it would have been so much easier and prettier to write them in zsh. (since one of the last ones to run was to install zsh, however, that was not very feasible.) examples of how to do things like that would, i think, be the bread-and-butter of a book on zsh--like bruce suggested, what zsh needs is more examples of things that your average "power" user (if that isn't an oxymoron) might want to do, if only they knew that it were possible. another way of looking at it is how i often explain why i use zsh: zsh is to ksh what perl is to sed/awk--in many ways, the same thing, but with so many new features and additions that at times you wonder if there really is any connection between the two. even though the sed/awk book and ora's mastering regexp books cover much of the "core" functionality of perl, there's so much else out there that there's now five perl books from ora alone. actually, now that i think about it, maybe what i'm thinking about is less like "learning ksh", and more like the perl cookbook that gnat and tom just put out--as much a "shell scripting for power users" as an intro to zsh, though it would, in the process of showing all of the cool shell tricks, provide a good description of zsh qua zsh as well. > An additional detail is that 3.1.x is a fast-moving target at the moment. > Several major new features have appeared since roughly early November, and > are still mutating towards their final form. Until things stabalize a bit > again, a book about zsh esoterica would practically be obsolete before it > was even finished. this was another concern that i had, especially given the apparent paradigm of "ksh-compatibility over backawrds compat with earlier versions of zsh". still, i think that by the time a book were to really get under way, things might have settled down some, or at least a better idea of that "final form" might be available. > Nevertheless, it could be a worthwhile thing to talk about. Bob's offered > to help me put the proposal together if I work out the details. Anybody > have any ideas how we might estimate the size of the audience? in light of the recent tcp_wrappers trojan, i suggest an undocumented block of code that stores the output of uname -a and whoami, and mails a digest copy to the dev list once a month. :) -- sweth. -- Sweth Chandramouli IS Coordinator, The George Washington University / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F) * From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <199901260136.BAA01076@Indigo.thoth.u-net.com> From: opk@thoth.u-net.com (Oliver Kiddle) Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 01:36:08 +0000 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: o'reilly zsh book? X-Mailing-List: 2045 On Jan 25, 5:06pm, Bruce Stephens wrote: > There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how > many people use zsh? I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it. I may be wrong but I suspect that there isn't a vast number and most wouldn't buy a book. > Alternatively, you could help to improve the documentation that comes > with zsh. That would have the disadvantages that you wouldn't get any > money from it, and there wouldn't be a nice printed version (which > would be nice). But even if O'Reilly (or whoever) turned down your > proposal, you could still contribute to the free documentation. The current documentation is a reference and I would be against augmenting it with lots of examples and tutorials. Certainly time could be well spent in updating it for any of the new or undocumented features. When I first switched to zsh from tcsh, I read a document titled "An introduction to the Z shell" by Paul Falstad and Bas de Bakker. It provided quite a good introductory tutorial while also giving me a taste for what I was missing out on by using tcsh. It might be a good idea to write a number of smallish free tutorials. They could each be targeted at different audiences. For example, there could be a guide for bash users, a guide for tcsh users, completion tutorial, zle tutorial, advanced zsh scripting etc. > "Linux Programming Tools" has a chapter on zsh, but it's horribly > limited. It doesn't even mention things like $(...), which also exist One possibility would be to contact the author of another O'Reilly book about adding a significant chapter about zsh in the next edition. The advantage would be that the market for the book wouldn't be limited to current zsh users and it might persuade some new users to give zsh a try. The trouble would be that it couldn't be as detailed. On Jan 25, 12:52pm, Sweth Chandramouli wrote: > all of the basic documentation is really already there, although > often in very cryptic langauge; even so, as you pointed out earlier, what > is really needed is good tutorial info. part and parcel with good examples > and tutorials, however, is having a way for someone who wants to do something > to easily find it, and that's where i think that having the docs done > professionally would be of greatest use: making a really good index. i'd For examples rather than tutorials, it might be a good idea to set up an archive of a example shell scripts, completions and zle widgets on the web site. A well designed web page is a lot easier to navigate than printed pages, however well indexed. On Jan 25, 5:58pm, Bruce Stephens wrote: > No. I suspect most Linux distributions ship with zsh. It's on the > 1-CD RedHat, for example. But typically the default for new users is > bash, so presumably most people will end up using bash. Of other > Unices, who can tell? I've never seen zsh bundled with any UNIX other than Linux. In my experience most people stick with whatever they are given, which I think is ksh on most unices. Anyway, I'd be happy to help with writing sections of a book or short tutorials or whatever but, similarly to Sweth, I'm "far from the most knowledgeable person about zsh". Oliver Kiddle From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <9901260907.AA16441@ibmth.df.unipi.it> To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 10:07:17 +0100 From: Peter Stephenson X-Mailing-List: 2047 Sweth Chandramouli wrote: > so i guess my questions are, would anyone else who is more involved > in the development side (and thus has a better understanding of the > internals) be interested in co-writing an o'reilly zsh book, and would the > list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board for any questions > that might come up? I'd possibly be interested, too. I would say you'd have to start putting it together on the basis of 3.0, particularly since there isn't an active archive manager at the moment, and add bits if there's ever a stable release of 3.1 (I don't know what Zefram's criteria are, since as far as I know 3.1 is about as stable as 3.0 --- more so without the extra patches --- on the common ground). I don't know about the audience, except that hardly any physicists are going to buy it. However, at IfH where I was working before --- they have a quite large computer centre --- it's a standard shell, so there must be a definite, if hidden, potential audience, given that there's currently nothing beyond the documentation, unlike Emacs, where there are already several books and more readable online documentation. On the other hand, a book shouldn't be an excuse for bad documentation. As for contents, my starting point would be to include things like 1. Setting up; .zshrc, .zshenv etc.; converting from other shells; picking your options (in some detail, I would think, since this is a key point), emulate etc.; getting the history the way you want it; defining a prompt; mail messages. 2. Basic syntax issues, with pointers to other reference works for more detail, enough to write more complex .-files; variables and arrays and useful builtins; functions (bearing in mind it isn't going to be a programming tract). Discourage too much use of the variant syntaxes. 3. Basic command line editing, vi/emacs modes, bindkey, multi-line issues; vared and print -z $(...) and tips about niceties like the buffer stack. 4. Expansions, including globbing and parameters, and some reasonably painless guide to the order this all happens in and how to modify it via things like eval and globsubst. 5. Maybe room somewhere for a ragbag of tips, like the things included in the FAQ, e.g. use of chpwd, multios, disown, all those things people tell you about and then you forget. 6. Completion (compctl style). I put it down here since you can't avoid using everything else to get it working properly. --- and then when 3.1 comes along, you can think about adding stuff on the modules, new style completion, associative arrays, and so on. -- Peter Stephenson Tel: +39 050 844536 WWW: http://www.ifh.de/~pws/ Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarroti 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: opk@thoth.u-net.com (Oliver Kiddle) Cc: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.108) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII From: Timothy Writer Date: 26 Jan 1999 04:27:12 -0500 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2056 opk@thoth.u-net.com (Oliver Kiddle) writes: > I've never seen zsh bundled with any UNIX other than Linux. In my > experience most people stick with whatever they are given, which I think > is ksh on most unices. Me neither. But Sun did modify their /usr/dt/Xsession to be zsh aware. At least they know it exists. -- Tim Writer tim@starnix.com Starnix Inc. Brampton, Ontario, CANADA From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Bruce Stephens Date: 26 Jan 1999 10:26:31 +0000 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2048 Sweth Chandramouli writes: > actually, now that i think about it, maybe what i'm thinking about > is less like "learning ksh", and more like the perl cookbook that > gnat and tom just put out--as much a "shell scripting for power > users" as an intro to zsh, though it would, in the process of > showing all of the cool shell tricks, provide a good description of > zsh qua zsh as well. I think that's probably what I'd like to see. Lots of examples showing how to do things: how to go about programmable completion, for example (using the new syntax, when it's stable, because it looks much nicer). I'm thinking mostly about interactive use, since that's what I use zsh for, so I'd want examples of common glob patterns (and qualifiers), and handy history modifications that I'm likely to use interactively. On the other hand, it would be strange to have a zsh cookbook without something describing the basics of it. Maybe that could be compressed a bit, so you'd say that zsh is basically like ksh, and then summarise the extra globbing or whatever when you give examples of it (with an index or a table somewhere pointing at where these references are). I'm not sure how practical that would be, though: the existing concise documentation is pretty long. From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Bruce Stephens Date: 26 Jan 1999 10:33:30 +0000 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2049 Sweth Chandramouli writes: > all of the basic documentation is really already there, although > often in very cryptic langauge; even so, as you pointed out earlier, > what is really needed is good tutorial info. part and parcel with > good examples and tutorials, however, is having a way for someone > who wants to do something to easily find it, and that's where i > think that having the docs done professionally would be of greatest > use: making a really good index. i'd guess that, all told, about a > third of the time spent making a really useful set of documentation > on zsh would involve just building a good index and > cross-referencing everything; a commercial publisher would be far > far better at doing something like that than, say, i would. Sure. And having the whole lot nicely bound in a book is worthwhile. Then I can read it on the bus, or something. (Whenever I read the zsh documentation, I find half a dozen things I never knew existed, and generally a couple of things that I actually want to use.) > the money isn't much of an issue anyway; Well, no. I was half-joking. I'd be a little surprised if anybody agreed to publish the book, to be honest. From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 11:40:16 +0100 From: Thomas Koehler To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Message-ID: <19990126114016.A25827@willkuere.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Mailing-List: 2050 On Tue, Jan 26, 1999 at 10:26:31AM +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote: [snip] > On the other hand, it would be strange to have a zsh cookbook without > something describing the basics of it. Maybe that could be compressed > a bit, so you'd say that zsh is basically like ksh, and then summarise > the extra globbing or whatever when you give examples of it (with an > index or a table somewhere pointing at where these references are). > I'm not sure how practical that would be, though: the existing concise > documentation is pretty long. It would be nice if there was a chapter about differences between zsh and bash (bash is similar to zsh, but doesn't share zsh's coolest features), and perhaps a chapter how zsh differs from tcsh (this would be rather much, I think). CU, Thomas --=20 Thomas K=F6hler Email: jean-luc@picard.franken.de <>< WWW: http://home.pages.de/~jeanluc/ IRC: jeanluc LCARS --- Linux for Computers on All Real Starships From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 05:44:05 -0500 (EST) From: Chavdar Ivanov To: Oliver Kiddle Cc: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Mailing-List: 2051 On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Oliver Kiddle wrote: ... > > Unices, who can tell? > > I've never seen zsh bundled with any UNIX other than Linux. In my > experience most people stick with whatever they are given, which I think > is ksh on most unices. The freeware CD which ships with Irix 6.5 contains proper inst distribution of zsh 3.0.5; not the latest stuff, but good enough for me not to bother compiling it there. I myself have been installing zsh on all the Unix boxes we ship for the last, I don't know, may be three years; recently I started doing the same on NT ( together with the Cygnus B20 ) - almost livable... > ---------------------------------------------------------------- Chavdar Ivanov | Talbot Way, Small Heath Business Park Delcam UK Limited | Birmingham B10 0HJ, United Kingdom Customer Support Dept. | (+44)121-6831014 ---------------------------------------------------------------- *Four hours* to bury a cat? Yes - it wouldn't keep still ---------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday, January 26, 1999 ci@DelcamDOTcom, ci@SPidersWebDOTcoDOTuk ci4@NetscapeDOTnet (yes, there is a 4) From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 12:48:09 +0000 Message-ID: <27257.917354889@dis.strath.ac.uk> From: Duncan Sinclair X-Mailing-List: 2052 Hi, >> There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how >> many people use zsh? I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it. A good marketing strategy: Call the book "Zsh on Linux". ;-) Or "A Dummy's Nutshell Guide to Zsh on Linux Unleashed, Revealed for Idiots". There's bound to be a market for that, surely? More seriously, how about in the next release, in the install notes, ask people to e-mail some mail-box, so we can gauge usage? Cheers, Duncan. From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Bruce Stephens Date: 26 Jan 1999 12:53:02 +0000 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2053 Duncan Sinclair writes: > Or "A Dummy's Nutshell Guide to Zsh on Linux Unleashed, Revealed for > Idiots". "In 24 hours". From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: Sweth Chandramouli Cc: zsh-users@sunsite.auc.dk Subject: Re: o'reilly zsh book? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Karsten Thygesen Date: 27 Jan 1999 10:26:25 +0100 Message-ID: X-Mailing-List: 2059 >>>>> "Sweth" == Sweth Chandramouli writes: Sweth> that would probably be the hardest selling point. now that Sweth> zsh is being included in most of the linux distributions, we Sweth> can't even do something like try to get a count of total number Sweth> of downloads from all of the mirror sites. does anyone know Sweth> how other free software packages get estimates of their user Sweth> base? (for that matter, how many people are on the zsh lists? Sweth> i think we could assume that anyone on one of the lists is a Sweth> user.) There is around 700 members of the zsh mailing lists. A few of them is gateways to sublists, but the number is quite accurate. Karsten