Since there's probably one person out there somewhere who will get upset
if I don't announce this beforehand and just sneak it in when no-one's
looking...

For the past six months or so we've had a 'Gentoo Syntax' package [1]
for vim / gvim. It's in the tree as app-vim/gentoo-syntax. This started
out as a small collection of syntax files which I wrote to make ebuild
and changelog highlighting work better, and has turned into a fairly
large "make vim syntax highlight and indent all things Gentoo" project
which is now maintained with help from ka0ttic and slarti.

As a rough idea of some of the things you get:

* syntax highlighting for make.conf, including error highlighting for
common screwups like "-02".

* improved ebuild support, with indent, character set and whitespace.
rules, highlighting for portage builtins and most of the commonly used
eclasses and error highlighting for many different kinds of screwup.

* working highlighting for Gentoo ChangeLogs -- normally vim tries to
highlight these as GNU ChangeLogs, and it makes a horrible mess. This is
how the whole thing started.

* highlighting for conf.d, env.d, init.d, metadata.xml, mirrors,
package.keywords, package.mask, package.use, use.desc, guidexml and glep
files.

* integration with Gentoo bugzilla -- when in normal mode, \bug will
give you a short summary of the bug whose number is under the cursor

* automatic skeleton content creation for new ebuilds, metadata and
conf.d/init.d files

* documentation for the above. It's in vim integrated help format rather
than guidexml -- I felt that this would be more useful. You can see this
online at [2] if you don't want to get it via vim.

As part of this, we've also added support to other app-vim things for
Gentooisms. app-vim/taglist now supports ebuild and eclass files, for
example.

I added gentoo-syntax as a PDEPEND for the ~arch vim-core with the last
revision bump. I've not had any complaints or requests for it to be made
optional, but I have had a significant number of people saying they like
it.

It's now getting close to the stage where a vim-core with the PDEPEND is
about to go stable on various archs (x86 included), so I'm posting this
as a last chance for anyone who has a good reason to not want this to
step up and scream.

Note: we already ship a whole load of debian-specific (and, for that
matter, windows-specific, osx specific and obscure languages like php
that no-one ever uses -specifc) stuff with vim-core since it's part of
the upstream runtime files collection, so "I care about a few tens of
KBytes of extra files" isn't going to cut it...

Livecd people: you're exempt, although I suggest you reconsider --
wouldn't it be nice if *every* editor highlighted CFLAGS="-02" in red so
that the user could see that they'd screwed up? :)

At some point I'd like to move this to being an official Gentoo project,
but that won't be until after the SVN GLEP goes through.

Anyway, you can post any complaints to me written on the back of a
twenty pound note.

[1] https://developer.berlios.de/projects/gentoo-syntax/
[2]
http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/*checkout*/gentoo-syntax/trunk/doc/gentoo-syntax.txt

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Fluxbox, shell tools)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm

Attachment: pgp5jCyHeb2ag.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to