On 12/18/23 00:57, Roman Perepelitsa wrote:
> I suppose you would want to do that in any case.

Reluctantly, yes.

But also, no.

The ancient FreeBSD 4.11 system that this was on croaked with a hard 
drive failure last night.  My friend, who owns the system, decided that 
there wasn't anything worth reviving the system for.  So ... this sort 
of turns into an academic exercise now.

I find myself having a reoccuring reaction to many of the following 
statements.  I know that you're correct.  But I don't like what it 
means.  I'm going to go kick dirt for a few minutes and come back.

> Right, you need to figure out how to write a functional and
> maintainable config for zsh 4.2.5, which lacks many niceties
> introduced in later versions.

I agree in concept.

> Exported parameters become a part of the process' environment, which
> gets inherited by all child processes. You don't want internal zsh
> parameters to be inherited by child processes. In the best case it'll
> do nothing, in the worst case it'll break things. To experience the
> latter, export PS1 and run `bash --norc`. Notice the broken prompt.

Hum.

I'd not thought about that before.  I have run into the very prompt 
issue that you're alluding to.

Is there a guideline for what should be exported and shouldn't be exported?

My primary concern is making sure that various preference are available 
where they need to be.

Or am I overcomplicating things by trying to pass things from one parent 
Zsh to a child Zsh when the child Zsh will initialize itself anew?

> To clarify my earlier point: if both branches work and produce
> identical prompt, you can keep just one of them. It's less code to
> test and maintain.

Occam's Razor & Parsimony

> Branching is necessary only when neither branch works in all situations 
> or when they have functionally distinct effects.

Valid distinction.

Very valid points.  #til  But I'm still pouting a little bit about what 
your correct statements mean.



-- 
Grant. . . .