Re: What is considered minimum version of zsh?

[Phil Pennock <zsh-workers+phil.pennock@spodhuis.org>]

On 2014-10-24 at 11:05 +0000, zzapper wrote:
> I was using I believe version v4.2.6 on Centos 5 and found that some 
> essential feature was missing. Yum didnt have an upgrade . In the end it 
> was easy enough to download a newer version and Make it.
> 
> But if you cant have the latest version what is your minimum version?

Others have noted that this is difficult to interpret meaningfully.

You probably want to:

  autoload +X is-at-least

which will let you do things like:

  is-at-least 4.3.7 && zmodload -mF zsh/files 'b:zf_*'
  is-at-least 4.3.6 && zmodload -ab -i zsh/stat zstat

After that, you can craft startup files to be somewhat portable.

Somewhere in the middle of the 4.3.x series (.5, .6?) zsh started being
usable as /bin/sh on various Linux systems, because we added features
like =~ and added flags to pre-command modifiers, to improve
compatibility with people ssh'ing into boxes and making shell
assumptions.

The zsh maintainers moved to 5.0.x as a numbering scheme to make a
public statement that this is the _stable_ branch of the shell, where
4.3, technically a development branch, had been in fact the stable
bug-fixed branch.

Either you can control the versions of the software available on all
affected systems, so can make sure you're as up-to-date as you need; or
you can't, and the question is meaningless because you have to work with
what you have.  The only middle-ground here is if you're trying to argue
that someone else should be doing work to upgrade, to your benefit.  In
that scenario, I recommend either making sure you're using version
guards such as is-at-least or learning about compiled programming
languages, where you have far fewer issues with run-time dependencies.

-Phil