vim-addons crashes if HOME is not set in the env

[Brendan Jurd]

If I execute vim-addons from a subshell that doesn't have environment variables such as HOME established, vim-addons crashes with the following error:

/usr/bin/vim-addons:190:in `join': can't convert nil into String (TypeError)
  from /usr/bin/vim-addons:190:in `parse_cmdline'
  from /usr/bin/vim-addons:237

The referenced line 190 is setting the default for the per-user directory.

This is a problem if, say, you're trying to use puppet to manage a vim addon and puppet is trying to execute `vim-addons -w install whatever` in a subshell.

Really, if you're trying to manage system-wide vim addons, the existence (or not) of a per-user directory shouldn't matter.

This was observed on Ubuntu precise with vim-addon-manager version 0.4.4.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for taking your time to report this issue and help making Ubuntu better.

I was able to reproduce this issue, which still leads to a crash in vim-addon-manager 0.5.2 on Ubuntu Trusty. I also found that this bug has been reported upstream to Debian, so I have attached a bug watch.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

I saw that the upstream bug in Debian had been closed, and version 0.5.3 released. I tried with that release on Ubuntu Trusty and I am no longer able to reproduce this issue. Thus, I believe it can be marked fix released.

If you need a fix for the bug in previous versions of Ubuntu, please perform as much as possible of the SRU Procedure [1] to bring the need to a developer's attention.

 [1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure