Re: zsh stable release, or is 4.3.4 stable enough for Fedora?

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

"Caio Marcelo" wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Is there any plan of releasing a new "stable" release of zsh in the
> near future? Or the stable/unstable convention isn't being used
> anymore?

Strictly speaking, 4.3.4 isn't stable in quite the same way 4.2 is.
How ever, that's less because it's broken than because it's a moving
target; "unstable" means "it keeps changing" rather than "it doesn't
work".  I don't think there are big problems with broken code.

What I'm looking for before producing a new stable release (which will
probably be version 5) are signs that the multibyte support in 4.3 is
complete enough that most users aren't going to find significant gaps.
It doesn't have to be flawless.  At some point we need to decide that
things are working well enough.  With Linux, I think that's already the
case, but I'm less clear about the state of other systems I don't see.

(I've also been worrying about completion inside nested quotes---it's a
fairly minor feature but it's also fairly badly messed up and fixing it
is likely to be a struggle.  I also need to complete the module feature
support; that's not so difficult but will needs some time.)

This doesn't answer the question about when it's going to appear because
I don't yet know.

> I'm asking this because Fedora is holding to update zsh package (today
> it's 4.2.6, from 2005-12-05) because 4.3.x versions are considered
> unstable. On the other hand updating would be very useful because of
> Unicode stuff in newer zsh. Maybe it would be fine to Fedora update to
> 4.3.4? Ubuntu have been using 4.3.x sincfe last year.

On balance, I think most users would probably benefit from upgrading.
The thing to worry about is less stability in terms of bugs, since I
don't see much evidence that's a problem, and more stability in terms of
features; see for example the list of incompatibilities in the README
file.  This isn't going to get much longer before version 5; the biggest
likely one is an option to fix the kludges described in the recent
threads about (R) subscripting (see for example the "Change in FIGNORE
behaviour" thread).

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