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by simiones 1303 days ago
> You do not take liberties with someone else's system, there is no need to do it and no excuse for it.

The whole point of the oh-my-zsh installation script is to modify your system to work with oh-my-zsh. If you don't want your system modified, you shouldn't run it: there is no other point of that script.

Build instructions are a completely separate thing, and are a complete distraction. No one sane waits for some random distro to discover your software and decide to package it themselves as a means of distributing it.

As far as most people are concerned, the role of things like apt or rpm is to manage the base system. Installing and keeping application software up to date is best left to the applications themselves - as it has always been on Windows or MacOS (before the app store craze), as it should be. It is not and should not be up to the Debian maintainers to tell me what version of Firefox to use, or how often I should update it.

Edit:

> Respecting the possibility that a config file or even the bins and libs might already exist as part of the "make install", are just part of the job like writing the software itself, not some unreasonable extra burden.

I assume you are referring to the author's complaint about the installer overriding their ~/.zshrc. If so, then that is again a misunderstanding of the point of this script - it explicitly tells you right in the description that it will do that AND it keeps the old file around in case you still need it.

To explain again - oh-my-zsh is a system for controlling your zsh installation. It's whole purpose is to take over things like your .zhsrc file. This is explained very clearly on their main page, so running that script and expecting it to not modify your zsh settings is like installing Firefox and expecting it not to connect to the Internet when you type a URL in the address bar.

1 comments

It's not just omz, as the article itself also says, omz is just an example and actually one of the less extreme ones.

Similar assumptions and liberties are more and more common, changing all manner of system-wide default behavior not just a user's own configs, sometimes even in direct conflict with other software that wants to make is own system-wide config such that you nominally couldn't have both things at the same time. Whichever you installed 2nd would work and break the other. While in reality neither one actually needed to make such assumptions or break anything else, could coexist fine, it was just grossly and inexcusably inconsiderate installers and directions.