Description of problem: zsh 4.2.x's line editor doesn't support Unicode. You can see this if you type something like üüüüüü on the shell prompt and then erase it with Backspace. You delete more charcters than you want, that means you erase your prompt. zsh 4.3 is about to be released and already very stable. It would be great if we could have this in Fedora ASAP as Fedoras default locale is UTF-8 and zsh 4.2.x is quite broken for this locale as described above. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 4.2.x
In fact 4.3.1 is already released (but not officially announced): ------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Stephenson <pws <at> csr.com> Subject: 4.3.1 released Date: 2006-02-28 13:06:30 GMT I've uploaded ftp://ftp.zsh.org/pub/zsh-4.3.1.tar.gz ftp://ftp.zsh.org/pub/zsh-4.3.1.tar.bz2 ftp://ftp.zsh.org/pub/zsh-4.3.1-doc.tar.gz ftp://ftp.zsh.org/pub/zsh-4.3.1-doc.tar.bz2 Please try this out on as many systems as possible as soon as you get a chance; if there are any significant problems I'll produce a 4.3.2. This is very little changed from 4.3.0-dev-5, so there shouldn't be any. If it looks OK I'll make the appropriate arrangements at Sourceforge and Freshmeat (please feel free to pass the message on elsewhere; I don't use comp.unix.shell or Slashdot myself). Thank you to everyone who helped. The release announcement currently looks like: This version contains initial support for multibyte characters in the shell's line editor (in particular UTF-8, although any character set supported by the system library is usable). Please read the appropriate sections of the file INSTALL as this support is not turned on by default on all systems where it can be used. The release also contains a few enhancements to shell syntax and supplied functions as well as numerous bug fixes. See the file NEWS for more detail. There are only a few unavoidable incompatibilities with previous versions, mostly to enhance compatibility with other shells and standards; see the README file. -------------------------------------------------------------------
*** Bug 205284 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Even Suse and Debian (both really not known to ship unstable code) are shipping zsh 4.3. (Suse already shipped in 10.2, Debian is going to ship in Edgy.) Why on earth can't Fedora users have this to. And is there anybody reading those bugzilla entries? I mean the initial report was nine month ago and there wasn't any response, this is rather discouraging.
I've been reading Zsh mailing lists and next zsh-4.3 release is probably going to happen early next year, perhaps best is to wait for it or use latest code from CVS, old 4.3 releases are far from perfect. However, I too strongly recommended using 4.3 series, it contains Unicode support + lots of bug fixes not in 4.2 branch.
Added to FC7 trackers
zsh is not in the default install, so no way this is a blocker. Putting on FC7Target instead.
Yeah, when a stable release is out with unicode support, I'll definitely add that as I sorely need it (i currently switch to bash every now and then because of this). I wish that they'd have set a goal to only add unicode support and nothing else, and simply work on that and get it solid quickly, but alas...
There is a zsh 4.3.2 release now, it seems, caillon.
4.3.x series is unstable. They follow the GNOME and kernel numbering schemes of Major.Even is stable, Major.Odd unstable.
oh, ok.
Moving off FC7Target then.
I've just sent an email about this bug to zsh developers mailing list. It may be of your interest. (The latest release from zsh is 4.3.4) http://www.zsh.org/mla/workers/2007/msg00469.html
Peter Stephenson (zsh maintainer) responded in the thread I've started http://www.zsh.org/mla/workers/2007/msg00471.html I think 4.3.4 is good enough for getting in Fedora. Even though is a "unstable" version, for me getting Unicode right is reason enough (I'm using 4.3.4 from a tarball). What do the package maintainers (or others) think? I'm a fairly new user of zsh so I don't have so much scripts that could break from incompatibilites, maybe I'm overlooking this aspect of upgrading.
I know that Japanese users also complain about current Fedora zsh as current zsh cannot Japanese character correctly and wish to have zsh upgraded to >4.3 (on Japanese Fedora BBS).
Wasn't unicode support for all apps a requirement, back in early Fedora?
How difficult would it be to backport unicode fixes into the current version?
After talking with some people in FreeNode zsh irc channel, backporting the Unicode support to 4.2.x seems to be a bad idea. We would need someone to do it (I don't think it's easy since is marked in the NEWS file of zsh as a 'major change'), and would raise a lot of Fedora-specific bugs that upstream won't support. If no one have complaints about breaking old scripts compatibility, I think we should follow upstream and go 4.3.4, which means: checking if the patches we have for 4.2.x are still needed (if they are, try to push upstream the ones we can) and updating the spec and do lots of other things that I don't know about yet :-) What do you think? Are the original package maintainers alive?
Closing this as I just moved to the "unstable stable" version of zsh for Fed-8.
Thank you. I just rebuild under F7 and it seems to work nicely.