Re: Out of the box

[Frank Terbeck <ft@bewatermyfriend.org>]

Lloyd wrote:
> Happy new year! I was setting up a new apple computer recently and I
> was disappointed that zsh still comes completely unconfigured, ex
> defaults to no history.

Indeed, zsh's defaults are pretty bare bones unconfigured and that's
largely due to the wish not to break existing setups. Zsh does contain a
setup wizard, that should help with initial setup in case you don't have
a setup in ‘~/.zshrc’ upon the first invocation of the shell.

> It got me wondering if there are any Unix or Linux distributions that
> exceed expectations with zsh configured out of the box?

Personally, I think that vendors should not screw too much with the
default setup of a program system-wide; not even mentioning the large
blobs of configuration that newbie's don't have a chance to debug in
case something fails.

That's being said, I'm one of the guys who help with the zsh confi-
guration of the grml Linux live distribution, that you can find at:

    http://grml.org/zsh/

It's a massive setup and I think for the use of a live installation,
that's fine. I still stand firm of the issue of handing large setups to
absolute beginners, for the reason I gave above.


Regards, Frank

-- 
In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
                                                  -- RFC 1925