On 11/02/09 03:48, Charles E. Campbell, Jr. wrote:
> Matt Wozniski wrote:
>> 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.
>
> There's been one problem with that -- 7.0 vimball doesn't handle the later
> vimball versions. 7.1 and has been compatible; newer vimballs have largely
> fixed small problems, not introduced incompatibilities.
>
> Vimball was done by request, consequently it didn't have much feedback
> before
> it went into 7.0.
>> 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.
>>
>
> I think that I could get vimball to handle binary files, which would
> mean that zip
> files could be embedded. However, most plugins don't need binary files
> (those with
> icons for signs would be an exception).
>> 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.
>>
> And putting these vim-specific features into zip files would be real
> popular with
> the rest of the zip community, I'm sure. At the very least, it'd be
> bloat for most
> such users. Then some other applications would want to chime in with
> their own
> application specific features.
>
> It'd be better to have a plugin that acted as a wrapper around zip to
> support the
> additional features that vimball provides. Probably could be a
> modification to the current
> zip handling plugin. The same sort of mods could be done with tar and
> the tar handling
> plugin, too. I'll consider doing it (after taxes and fafsas).
>
> Chip
And then there are people like me who can un- .zip files if they have
to, but prefer to gunzip them (un- .gz), which is the Unix standard (as
opposed to the Microsoft Megabucks LoseDough standard). And note that if
the right tools are present (gunzip in the $PATH), a compressed vimball
(*.vba.gz) will (if I'm not mistaken) be handled by Vim just as easily
as an ordinary one. For you poor serfs of Bill Gates, WinZip (for
instance) can uncompress .gz files as an easy preliminary step. (Last I
checked, it couldn't do .bz2 though.)
OTOH I have had encoding compatibility problems in the past but I solved
them manually and I don't remember exactly what they were. I think they
were related to the fact that my vimrc includes ":setglobal fenc=utf-8
bomb" for new files and that it sometimes created problems if there
already were differently-encoded files in the same directories.
As for line-ending format differences, "portable scripts" can be
distributed in only the Unix version (LF-without-CR) since
Vim-for-Windows and Vim-for-Mac can edit and source them with no problem
unless a nondefault 'fileformats' setting explicitly makes it
incompatible with them.
People who (like me) don't always want to unpack the vimball into the
first tree in 'runtimepath' can always use the :UseVimball command with
an explicit path at the command-line rather than by sourcing the
vimball. (It often makes sense to unpack a vimball globally into
$VIM/vimfiles rather than user-privately into ~/.vim or ~/vimfiles even
if one of the latter exists. This is a feature which Dr. Chip added at
my suggestion two and a half years ago.)
Yes, vimballs, like many Vim features, do take some getting used to (and
it took me some time to get used to them); but I believe they are a
worthwhile component.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
There was a young whore from Kaloo
Who filled her vagina with glue.
She said with a grin,
"If they pay to get in,
They can pay to get out again too!"
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