Arch Linux

We can't create symlinks just on install of zsh though, what if a user wants to have users with 2 different default shells?

Another way to solve this issue is removing '--enable-etcdir=/etc/zsh' option in zsh's PKGBUILD.

This allows zsh to read correctly the /etc/profile

Removing this option solves the problem for me. One should review the other etc-options, too. In addition to this it might be a good idea to explicitly enable multibyte support.

But another problem is that /etc/profile uses some bash-specific stuff (like PS1,2)

I have to revert my last comment. This does not work for xterms. If you start a xterm you'll get a broken locale. But if you start another xterm from there the second one will work. So I would assume that some vars have to be set before xterm is starting which cannot be achieved with the "fix" mentioned above.

So why not got with the symlinks? It would not break anything.

Afaik, most terms have a login shell mode.
Kde, gnome and xfce terms have an option in their gui iirc.
And for urxvt and xterm, I have these two lines in ~/.Xdefaults :
urxvt*loginShell: true
xterm*loginShell: true

I just wanted to mention this because that's what I use and it works fine for me.

When I use a real login shell, it works fine too. And then if I start a X session from a login shell, the options are inherited, so I actually don't even need that loginShell option.
I don't understand what is wrong, zsh loads /etc/profile just fine here..

I've updated zsh, and I've not removed the /etc/zsh lines.

So far all I've seen is that people aren't running login shells when they want one..

codemac, seems you're missing a couple lines in your pkgbuild

mkdir -p $startdir/pkg/etc/zsh
install -D -m 755 $startdir/zprofile $startdir/pkg/etc/zsh/zprofile

enders, this is intentional, look at the following old commit :
http://cvs.archlinux.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/system/zsh/PKGBUILD.diff?r1=1.16&r2=1.17&cvsroot=Extra

hmm k
it is included with the build files from abs, so i thought it was a mistake that it didn't get installed.

so wouldn't '--enable-zprofile=/etc/profile \' be a better option than
'--enable-zprofile=/etc/zsh/zprofile \' ?
or maybe 'echo ">> link /etc/profile to /etc/zsh/zprofile" in the post_install

well if you look at that cvs link, there is also :
--enable-zprofile=/etc/profile \
in the new version

could this considered solved? also i would suggest ditching usr_zsh.sh too with the next upgrade. it is far too old to be useful

might add a link to the zsh wiki entry, since zsh won't read files in /etc/profile.d/ without the entry below in ~/.zshrc
---------
if [ `ls -A1 /etc/profile.d/ | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
for profile in /etc/profile.d/*.sh; do
if [ -x $profile ]; then
. $profile
fi
done
unset profile
fi
-----------

Just because one month passed don't give you the right to ignore everything that was said. Again, zsh is built with --enable-zprofile=/etc/profile so profile is sourced when you use a login shell.
If you don't use a login shell at any point when starting your working environment, that's your problem, so fix it.
For example, you might be using a broken login manager like kdm which assumes that zsh profile is in /etc/zprofile. You can work around that issue by making a zprofile symlink manually. But that's an issue with kdm, not zsh.
And if you are going to hack it like above, then just do source /etc/profile in your .zshrc instead of duplicating everything.