Re: PATCH: prompt fun

[Adam Spiers <adam@thelonious.new.ox.ac.uk>]

Bart Schaefer (schaefer@candle.brasslantern.com) wrote:
> On Oct 4,  7:40pm, Adam Spiers wrote:
> > Subject: PATCH: prompt fun
> > Here's a more light-hearted addition, which I've finally got round to
> > turning into a releasable form -- themeable prompts.
> 
> This is cool, but it's the kind of thing that makes me repeat my suggestion
> that things like this (and most of the more esoteric bits of the completion
> system) should be packaged and supported separately from the shell itself.

Yes, I've been thinking about these issues myself, although I always
tend to come down on the side in favour of packaging it all together.
I really like the idea of one `super-shell' which has all the good
stuff bundled with it.  Why?  Hmm.  I suppose because:

  - separate packages for one shell is quite fiddly and very likely to
    put people off (I've had enormous problems persuading highly
    intelligent, open-minded friends that even changing /from/ /tcsh/
    is worth the hassle), and so it seems important that the install
    path is made as smooth as possible.

  - zsh's main characteristic, for me, is that it's jam-packed with
    loads of great extra features.  I suspect that many people view it
    in that light, and download it because they want all those extras,
    rather than because they want a standard UNIX shell with a
    slightly different flavour.  Hence, it seems rather perverse to
    download and install zsh and then have to download and install
    other packages before you have all the bonus goodies.  [As an
    aside along the same argument, it seems a shame that most of zsh's
    bells and whistles aren't enabled by default, but I suppose there
    are strong backwards compatability arguments for this, and that
    individual distributions can enable them.  We've already seen this
    happening with the new completion system and Mandrake Linux, in
    fact.]

  - Improvements to (say) the new completion system very often go
    hand-in-hand with improvements/bugfixes to the C source, so
    splitting up this parallel development would probably cause more
    a lot more problems than it would solve.

  - zsh is hardly bloatware, and shows no danger of becoming even
    remotely close IMO.

However, there are obviously cons to the single package argument too,
which is probably shown up at its most absurd when k3wl_d0oD ANSI PS1
strings end up inside the main source tree.  I'm not sure what the
best answer is, but my instincts would say a compromise - include a
few nice prompts catering for a wide range of tastes, and then leave
the rest to the IRC kiddies (hmm, that's me I guess) to work on.  That
was the approach I tried to take with this prompt patch.

Thoughts?