Ian Tegebo wrote:
After using vimballs, GetLatestVimScripts, and its autoinstall, I
wonder what the larger group has thought about in terms of plugin
management, dependencies, and standards. I find that some of my
favorite plugins require certain versions of one another, or vim7.
In general, I know this is considered an upstream problem that the
OS's package management should handle but I find that many plugins
aren't available or are outdated in FreeBSD, Debian, Gentoo, etc.
I've had some positive experience with applications managing their own
plugins and thought that GetLatestVimScripts and vimballs provide a
starting point for this.
I think for this approach to work that at least a couple of things
would need to happen. Plugin developers would need to have a standard
format similar to what is necessary for GetLatestVimScripts.
Secondly, some provision should probably be made for preserving ones'
changes to files while updating configurations.
Does anyone think this idea has any traction? If so, what would the
next steps be? If not, how have other people solved this problem?
I use SuSE, where Vim itself (not to mention the plugins) lags behind, though
less than one might think (currently 7.0.146 while Bram's "latest" is
7.0.219). The way I solve the problem is by compiling and installing Vim
myself from Bram's latest sources & runtimes, and making sure that "my" Vim
comes earlier in the $PATH than SuSE's (which I can't remove if I don't want
to get warnings from YaST about unsatisfied package dependencies). In
practice, that means: leave SuSE's Vim as /bin/vim (with soft link,
/usr/bin/vim) and install mine at Bram's distribution default location, viz.
/usr/local/bin/vim.
Another reason to compile my own is to get a more "capable" version: SuSE's
Vim is a "Big version without GUI", and (among others) -mouse_gpm -perl
-python -ruby -tcl, mine is a "Huge version with GTK2-GNOME GUI", +mouse_gpm
+perl +python +ruby +tcl.
To preserve one's changes to files, don't make any. I mean, don't change
anything in the $VIMRUNTIME tree. Incremental changes should go (on Linux) in
$VIM/vimfiles/after or $HOME/.vim/after, replacements or
new-scripts-created-from-scratch should go in $VIM/vimfiles or $HOME/.vim (and
their subdirectories in all 4 cases), with the exception of .vimrc and .gvimrc
which go into $HOME.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
You need no longer worry about the future. This time tomorrow you'll
be dead.
