zsh: make the disabling of /etc optional

[sorin-ionescu]

Requested by @indrajitr.

[adamv]

Should this be on or off by default?

[sorin-ionescu]

Right now, it's off by default. Personally, i'd rather have it on. Let's hear @indrajitr's opinion.

[indrajitr]

I agree with @sorin-ionescu. etcdir should be on by default.

The patch (along with the great writeup on caveats) makes sense to me. This way, there would be least surprise to people upgrading from previous version. And they would be consistent with zsh manpages and all the docs that talk about /etc/zprofile, /etc/zshenv etc.

While having the default enabled has it's own effect, it is abundantly clear from the caveats section. This is something a zsh power user on Mac should take care of anyway (homebrewed or otherwise).

OT: @sorin-ionescu, your OMZ fork shaping up very well!

[indrajitr]

Would be nice to have this in please.

[jacknagel]

Pulled.

[indrajitr]

Thanks!

[cdlm]

Are the caveat instructions about renaming /etc/zshenv to /etc/zprofile correct ? I did that and with the zsh formula available now, I got /usr/bin etc in front of my custom $PATH entries.

[sorin-ionescu]

@cdlm Yes, the instructions are right.

[cdlm]

@sorin-ionescu What I don't get is that path_helper seems to prepend everything including the basic paths like /usr/bin, so if it runs from /etc/zprofile it takes precedence over custom paths set from ~/.zshenv… and I don't want to move my setup to ~/.zprofile, since I want my scripts to inherit it. Am I missing something?

[sorin-ionescu]

If you move /etc/zshenv to /etc/zprofile, you avoid path_helper.

[cdlm]

For me it still runs, but after my own .zshenv (right, maybe just in interactive shells, but that's still a pain).

I don't really care about the couple paths that it sets, so I recompiled zsh with /etc disabled, but I'd still like to understand what the proper setup is for user-specific paths that should take precedence on system ones.

[sorin-ionescu]

It's best to avoid using /etc.

[jacknagel]

Should we be setting etcdir to HOMEBREW_PREFIX/etc? Would that be useful and/or beneficial?

[sorin-ionescu]

No, no other package messes with /etc, AFAIK.

[eatnumber1]

What's the argument for moving /etc/zshenv to /etc/zprofile? As far as I'm aware, the only thing it does is make the paths produced by path_helper take precedence over changes to PATH made by ~/.zshenv, which is not desirable.

[samuelcole]

I just noticed the same thing, and I don't understand why you wouldn't want path_helper to run for scripts as well?

[dwlf]

I'm in the same boat as @samuelcole @eatnumber1 @cdlm.

@sorin-ionescu @indrajitr under what use case does one not want --disable-etcdir? Why is it not the default behavior? Default --disable-etcdir would seem to minimize hard to debug problems. The caveat is a distraction.

[sorin-ionescu]

@lloydde You would not want to disable /etc if the configuration files in there are useful to you, such as setting the path.