From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 12571 invoked by alias); 10 Nov 2013 09:00:16 -0000 Mailing-List: contact zsh-workers-help@zsh.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk X-No-Archive: yes List-Id: Zsh Workers List List-Post: List-Help: X-Seq: 31947 Received: (qmail 11304 invoked from network); 10 Nov 2013 09:00:09 -0000 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.2 (2011-06-06) on f.primenet.com.au X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE, SPF_HELO_PASS autolearn=ham version=3.3.2 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: zsh-workers@zsh.org From: Martin Vaeth Subject: Install run-help and *.zwc files system wide in build system Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 08:57:11 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: Reply-To: vaeth@mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: lounge.imp.fu-berlin.de User-Agent: slrn/pre1.0.0-26 (Linux) Hello, I am maintaining for Gentoo linux a user overlay which installs files for "run-help" system wide. In my opinion this is very important since new zsh users (who nowadays typically come from bash) are used to bash's "help", and IMHO something similar should be possible out-of-the-box for them. The "documented way" to produce the files for run-help is only suboptimal, because: 1. The files are only installed per-user and not system-wide which would be clearly preferrable. 2. It does not work out-of-the box: With current man/groff versions, one must export (an empty) GROFF_NO_SGR, MANWIDTH=80, possibly unset MANPL, MANROFFSEQ, set utf8-aware locales etc. In a recent discussion with the gentoo zsh maintainer, the conclusion was to make the following suggestions to you: (a) It would be nice if zsh would be able to install system-wide help files in the build process. (b) Similarly, it would be nice if zsh would be able to install *.zwc files for the functions it provides in the build process. Of course, both should happen only if appropriate ./configure options are passed (e.g. compiling *.zwc files is only possible in the build process if no cross-compilation is happening, and building help-files requires tools like man, groff, and perl which one should not require just to _build_ a zsh). If there is interest, I will write and post a script (and perhaps also a patch to the build system to call this script) which generates the files for run-help into a specified directory and tries to take care off all the issues mentioned in 2. This would take care of (a). I am not sure what is the best strategy to (b), since package managers tend to change timestamps of directories/filse when copying installed files from a building sandbox or binary archive to the live filesystem: Somehow one must guarantee that the *.zwc files have the newest filestamps, since otherwise they are ignored by zsh (AFAIK). Should one perhaps produce a script (or at least a list of files) in the building process which will touch these files so that this script can then just be called in a post-install hook? Regards Martin Väth