Re: Updates to zsh-4_2-patches branch

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

Paul Ackersviller wrote:
> I promised to do this months ago, but didn't get far over the course
> of the winter...  Excuses aside, I've been hard at it for the past
> week or two, and have gotten up to about the middle of last year in
> merging trunk changes onto the branch.

Thanks for the work, it's very useful.

> How comprehensive is the test suite, and are there any major gotchas?

The test suite is good at stuff related to scripting and syntax,
moderately good but rather incomplete at the low levels of completion
and line editing, and poor at things which are only testable
interactively like job control.

> One area I could use help or at least guidance on is files in Src/Zle/.
> I've merged in only a few changes there, when it appeared to be
> non-multibyte-related, but is it better to try leaving that completely
> alone?  I fear a few multibyte changes that don't belong mat have crept
> in, but I'll see how testing goes.

Zle has changed so much that it might well be better to leave anything
alone that isn't obviously a standalone fix for a specific problem
that applies cleanly.  We've made various tweaks to simplify interfaces
both internally and to related parts of the main shell such as quoting
to make adding multibyte support easier; these aren't generally
bug fixes and don't need applying.

> In terms of documenting what I've done, is there any value in sending
> all the change numbers to this list?  There will be very many, so I'm
> thinking those numbers would better go into the change comments for the
> individual cvs revisions.

It would be fine if they just appeared in the ChangeLog on the branch.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/