On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 10:54, Andrei Thorp <garoth@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello, fellow Archers.

Recently, I had a question about Vim, so I went to the #vim channel in IRC. I was doing something that should be working, but it wasn't. Surprisingly, the question came up, "Are you on Arch?"

Turns out that several of the peolpe I most respect in the #vim IRC channel are very unhappy with the quality of Arch's Vim package. One even (jokingly?) asked if they could officially not support Arch in the channel, which I found somewhat alarming. I suggested that we should instead help improve the Arch package.

I hate to pick on people, but according to the generally kind folks on IRC, the Vim package for Arch has quite a few issues, and the maintainer hasn't addressed some outstanding bugs in quite a long while.

As some of you may know, James Vega (jamessan) is an outstanding Vim user and the Debian package maintainer for Vim. I asked him to send me what he saw as the problems with the Arch package, and he was kind enough to send along some suggestions. They are attached in this forward.

Thank you,

-Andrei Thorp

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: James Vega <jamessan@debian.org> Date: Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 2:29 AM Subject: Arch's Vim failings To: garoth@gmail.com

Andrei,

Thanks for being receptive to trying to address the issues in Arch's Vim packaging.  Below are the major points that stand out.

1) gvim package: Shipping an /etc/gvimrc which, due to the order that   Vim loads rc files, overrides any settings in the user's ~/.vimrc.   Considering that some users make the conscious decision to keep all   their settings in their ~/.vimrc instead of using both ~/.vimrc and   ~/.gvimrc, this is at the very least annoying.  More in depth   discussion is contained in the nearly year old, unfixed bug[0] about   this issue.

2) vi package: The package is built such that the resulting vi binary   reads its config from the completely non-standard ~/.virc.   Presumably this is to allow different configurations for the   different feature-sets avaiable in vi vs. vim packages.  Fortunately,   Vim has methods to deal with this already such as being able to check   what name was used to invoke Vim[1] and explicitly checking for   feature support[2].

3) vi, vim, and gvim packages: Explicitly building Vim with $VIMRUNTIME   == $VIM by specifying "--with-global-runtime=/usr/share/vim" to   configure.  This doesn't need to be specified to configure as it will   be set to the correct directory on its own.  If they insist on   specifying it, the directory should be /usr/share/vim/vimXY (where XY   is Vim's version number -- 72 for current Vim).

  This manifests various problems, the most noticeable being that the   'runtimepath' option in Vim has /usr/share/vim listed twice, thus   causing runtime files to be sourced twice and causing duplicate   information when using common scripting methods for discovering files   in the runtimepath[3].

-- James GPG Key: 1024D/61326D40 2003-09-02 James Vega <jamessan@debian.org>

[0] - http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10303 [1] - if v:progname == 'vi' [2] - if has('cscope') [3] - globpath(&rtp, 'colors/*')

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAknB5lcACgkQDb3UpmEybUCg6ACgjRFE4YnrbEGMq8uY51CZqRis xZsAnjbOC4BsAv/hYG9hcfmbogJLdLtX =HJf3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

I don't have a whole lot to add to this, except that it seems like a good idea to confer with the vim developers to raise the quality of the package. I would file a bug report on the Arch tracker. (Also sending to arch-general, so this gets more exposure)