Daniel Shahaf wrote: […] > - Packages that are part of Debian should install to > /usr/share/zsh/vendor-*. > > - Upstream packages have three options: > > + Install to /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions (regardless of their > own $PREFIX _and_ of zsh's $PREFIX)
This is precisely the right fpath entry for site local function files. The Debian package set this to a /usr/local directory even when configu- red with --prefix=/usr since before the current team took over. This is the right thing to do in any case, since non-package files should just be dropped into /usr/share/. We *added* the ‘vendor-*’ directories to get fpath entries that are under the control of the package system for packages to drop additional functions into. It's been this way since about 2011. A couple of years later (2014-ish) zsh upstream changed its compile time configuration semantics with respect to site-function directories: It now ensures that /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions is *always* there and on top of the fpath variable. This acknowledges that /usr/local/ is the right place for site local additions, which I don't think anybody disputes. The change in handling site-function directories is that compile time configuration also adds a PREFIX/share/zsh/site-functions directory, with lower priority than the one in /usr/local. The reason this doesn't get added on Debian right now is that we're still setting ‘--enable-site-fndir=/usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions’ explicitly. Dropping this setting would change this. Since Debian's ‘vendor-*’ directory handling predates this by years, changing this, effectively adding a second path for the same purpose seems inelegant, since it adds redundancy where none is needed. This however, sucks: % apt-file search usr/share/zsh/site-functions/ | wc -l 30 Because that is thirty functions that will not work. When we added the ‘vendor-*’ stuff, we filed bug reports for packages that tried this, because even back then, it wouldn't have worked, because site-functions always was in /usr/local with Debian's zsh. That resulted in this: % apt-file search vendor-completions | wc -l 166 I am not sure if there's an elegant way to resolve this, because the ‘vendor-*’ directories are the documented way for zsh packages to add functions for more than a decade. I don't think dropping them is a good idea, because it would break backward compatibility. And as I said, just adding the second --prefix based site-functions entry would litter the system by added multiple destinations for the same purpose. Maybe there's a way to add a lintian check for the installation path of zsh function files in Debian packages. With that, we could add the pre- fix based site-functions directory, but deprecate its use. That way, packages that disrespect the zsh package's policy still work, while keeping the possibility of a clean system, in case all package adhere to the policy. We could file a bunch of bugs for the packages that are cur- rently using /usr/share/zsh/site-functions right now. Regards, Frank
