On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Charles Campbell wrote: > James Vega wrote: >> >> I'm still curious what purpose vimballs serve over a standard archive >> format like zip or tar.gz. From a distribution perspective, all they've >> done is made my work harder when trying to include vim scripts in a >> package for a Linux distribution. >> > * they automatically enable help for any enclosed help files > * files go where they need to; they're not dependent on the user > changing to the appropriate directory first. > * one may uninstall the files extracted by a vimball (:RmVimball > vimballname) > * the vimball itself requires no addtional tools beyond vim itself > (compression/decompression is another matter)
But let's not forget that they have significant disadvantages, too... Vimballs made with new versions of the plugin don't work on older vims. Considering that those writing and distributing scripts are much more likely to be at the bleeding edge than the users who download those scripts, they're quite likely to wind up distributing something that many of their users can't use. It's also not possible to include binary files in a vimball, or fines with different encodings, or even files with different line endings. IMHO, this makes them significantly less useful than zip files, since we could add those 3 nice features (automatic :helptags, extracted to first writable directory, uninstallable) to zip files without having to tolerate the disadvantages that vimball doesn't seem to be able to overcome... Really, it seems that depending on an unzip program being on the computer is far better than implementing our own barely-featured interface-unstable self-extracting-archive-that-wants-to-be-a-zipfile. I think that an effort to nicely encapsulate the platform differences and such of handling zipfiles, or possibly even one day writing a vimscript unzipper, would be a better use of our resources than continuing to maintain vimball. ~Matt --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
