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

[Andrei Thorp]

Thanks for sending it along, Dae.

-AT

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Kessia 'even' Pinheiro
<kessiapinheiro at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>