Re: commits for possible 5.9.1

What's still needed to launch named references?

In my opinion, it depends greatly on how we advertise the initial launch.
If we initially advertise named references as a new experimental feature,
then not that much is still needed. At the very least, we should remove
support for subscripted references (workers/54363
<https://zsh.org/workers/54363>), which only work in the simplest cases.
The other pending patches would also be nice. Ideally, for a solid initial
launch, I would prefer to be able to finish my review of the code. However,
once subscripted references have been removed, named references could in
principle be launched any time as an experimental feature. I'm aware of a
number of things that are still broken but I'm not aware of anything major
and I would be surprised to still find a major issue.

How much time is still needed for a solid launch?

I will post another message where I list what I still have on my todo list.
Currently the main bottleneck is by far the review time and then my energy
and motivation. If I could just commit my patches or if someone had the
time and energy for quick reviews, I could most likely finish what I have
in mind for a solid launch in 1-2 months. Quick reviews would for sure
improve my motivation and pressure to release soon would certainly help me
focus. Unfortunately some patches are rather intricate and may require
quite some time to review (even I sometimes need quite some time to
re-understand them when I have to revisit them). Anyone interested in
helping with reviews would also need to get familiar with what's going on
in params.c <https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh/blob/master/Src/params.c>.

What do I mean with an experimental feature?

The main point would be to indicate that some behaviors may still change in
the next release. Nobody should use the new feature in any critical code.
Instead, interested users should try out the new feature and tell us how it
works for them and whether they think some aspects should be changed. There
were a number of design discussions. Some of them still haven't been
resolved. One reason being that most of these discussions ended up being
just between me and Bart. Having more people, especially actual users of
the feature, could greatly help. An experimental launch could be a good way
to get such additional feedback. We could even give a list of areas for
which we are most interested in receiving feedback.

What to do next?

Here is my preferred course of action:
- Submit the pending patches
- Work on my todo list to get to a state where there are no more know bugs,
only open design questions
- Release version 5.10 that includes named references, no-fork
substitutions, and namespaces as experimental features with a call for
feedback and a promise to release these features for general use 6-12
months later in version 6.0.

Philippe