[aur-general] Arch's Vim Failings & Solution Suggestions

[Kessia 'even' Pinheiro]

Hi,

I had that problem too, i asked for something in #vim channel and they
only ridicularize vim package from Arch. I tried talk with Tobias
about the vim upgrade for support ruby1.9, but he are so far from fix
it, looking for problems which isnt important, in my vision. VI
package are with 65 patch, unless the oficial project are with more
than 100! I think it's a problem from arch package, but we need know
why it's so problematic for vim users dont like the package layout.

thanks

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Andrei Thorp <garoth at 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 at debian.org>
> Date: Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 2:29 AM
> Subject: Arch's Vim failings
> To: garoth at 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 at debian.org>
>
> [0] - http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10303
> [1] - if v:progname == 'vi'
> [2] - if has('cscope')
> [3] - globpath(&rtp, 'colors/*')
>
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-- 
Kessia Pinheiro
Computer Science Student - Brazil, UFBa
Linux System Administrator
Arch Linux Trusted User
Linux User #389695
http://even.archlinux-br.org
---
X Fórum Internacional Software Livre - fisl10
24 a 27 de junho de 2009
PUCRS - Porto Alegre - Brasil