On 06/05/09 19:57, Erik Falor wrote: [...] > Since I don't like hacking the system vimrc each time I update, and > because I like to stay on Vim's bleeding edge, I added Vim to my > portage/profile/package.provided file so Gentoo Portage wouldn't try > to manage it for me. > > It works great because my package manager is aware that Vim is > available as a dependency for other packages I may choose to install, > but won't try to update it for me. Do other package managers in other > distros have a similar concept? > > This is a great solution for me since I like to build Vim by hand, but > perhaps it wouldn't work so well for someone who doesn't want to be > bothered with building Vim in the first place, who is just looking for > the package manager to "get it right" in the first place. >
Probably it wouldn't. Well, Vim is easy enough (and, unlike Mozilla apps, not too time- and resource-greedy) to build<advert>, and I have HowTo pages on the Vim part of my home site to mahe it even easier</advert>. What I do is, I let the distro's package manager (YaST, from the SuSE distro) install and manage Vim (at usr/bin/vim and /usr/bin/gvim) but I also build it myself (with the default install at /usr/local/bin/vim with softlink at /usr/local/bin/gvim et al.) which comes earlier in the $PATH. So Vim is listed as "available as a dependency", but anyone (including me) calling it with no explicit path will find the hugest-latest version I built and installed -- and for some reason my binary is smaller than SuSE's though I have 7.2.166 +gui_gtk2 +gui_gnome with Bill McCarthy additional float funcs, where the distro has 7.2.108 +gui_gtk2 -gui_gnome, and we both have the same 4 out of 5 interpreted languages included. And I don't think it's stripping: theirs 3.7 Mb, mine 3.4, mine without stripping 6.1. Well, I haven't gone through all features in detail but at first glance they're pretty much the same. And the above also shows another advantage of compiling my own Vim: not only do I know, as we already said, exactly what goes into it (what runtime files but also what compile-time options, including in my case +gui_gnome -tag_old_static +xterm_save and the atan2() etc. functions) goes into it, in addition I get the latest version, sometimes minutes or at most hours after Bram publishes the patches, while the distro of course lags behind, and more likely by weeks or even months -- 7.2.108 is 11-Feb-2009, outdated since 7.2.109 came out on 21-Feb, soon followed in the following days by up to 7.2.127 on 24-Feb, 7.2.132 on 05-Mar, 7.2.141 on 11-Mar, 7.2.148 on 20-Mar, 7.2.160 on 22-Apr, 7.2.166 on 29-Apr. Wow! Dazzling at times how many patches Bram can put out in a burst. Makes me wonder what he may have up his sleeve for the upcoming days ;-). (The above dates are straight from http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/7.2/ ). Best regards, Tony. -- Acid -- better living through chemistry. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
