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

[Tobias Kieslich]

Hi,

	I was reaaly busy lately so I wasn't able to push tha changes I made
locally.
> 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.
I got rid of gvimrc in etc, I still wonder thought why they would
have such a file upstream. Also virc is gone. Since we won't ship a vim
based vi package anymore.
> 
> 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].
vi will be besad on nvi. that has lot's of advantages:
- smaller for the iso
- no waiting on testing that stalls vim and gvim
- vi and vim are separated

> 
> 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].
I was not aware of the double loading, a testbuild showed me that it is
easy to build both packages (vim/gvim) without the path specified. The
idea behind specifying was that gvim and vim use the same runtime but
only one package ships it. So being explicit instead of implicit seemed
like a good idea to me. Anyway, that will be gone as well in the new
layout.

Hopefully tonight I can push them to testing. For the update people will
be forced to remove the /usr/bin/vim and I think the /usr/bin/rview
symlink manually. I tried to find a way around that, but no dice.

	-T