Unnecessary divergence from Debian

[James McCoy]

Binary package hint: vim

The Ubuntu patch to the vim packaging contains a few diversions from Debian that are unneeded.
1) "set textwidth=0" in debian/runtime/debian.vim.in since that is Vim's default
2) "set nobackup" in debian/runtime/debian.vim.in since that is Vim's default
3) Adding NoDisplay=true to debian/gvim.desktop is no longer required (as stated 3 years ago at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vim/+bug/13409/comments/4), and would address a couple of long-standing bugs -- #3222, #50576.
4) "set viminfo='20,\"50" in debian/runtime/debian.vim.in. This one is more questionable but I feel that the difference between this value and Vim's default is not worth the divergence between Ubuntu and Debian. Vim's default is "'20,<50,s10,h". The first two settings of the option are exactly what is already declared in Ubuntu ('\"50' is the equivalent to '<50', just using old syntax).

The 'h' setting disables effect of the 'hlsearch' option when Vim starts -- i.e., it won't cause the stored search term from a previous Vim session to be highlighted upon starting a new Vim session. The user will have to perform a new search first. Keeping 'h' seems to fall under the principle of least surprise.

The 's10' setting limits individual items stored in the viminfo file to 10 Kbyte. When the 's' setting isn't given, then Vim saves the entire register instead of the given number of Kbytes. Which behavior is preferred is debatable, but creating a diversion for it seems like more work than it's worth.

N.B., I decided to open a bug about this since I wasn't able to find any useful details about communicating with my Ubuntu counterpart(s) aside from just emailing the most recent uploader.

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Thanks for the hints, James. As far as #3 goes, I added some more information and changed the status of bug #3222, to hopefully get that resolved. Are you the maintainer of the package in Debian? It might help out to chime in yourself there, explaining why it can be removed.

I think your best bet might be to make this bug report just about #1 and #2, since those are very uncontroversial. Then make a separate report for #4, explaining that once #3222 and this are fixed, it makes sense to just use the default and remove the divergence.

Anyway, just my thoughts, this bug report might be more useful to the Ubuntu maintainer in its present form, if they are willing to do everything explained here.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for these! There's no need to open a separate bug report; I think it makes sense to apply all of these and will do so shortly.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package vim - 1:7.1.314-3ubuntu3

---------------
vim (1:7.1.314-3ubuntu3) intrepid; urgency=low

  * runtime/syntax/grub.vim:
    - Add Ubuntu-specific 'quiet' keyword.
  * Remove some unnecessary divergence from Debian, thanks to James Vega
    (LP: #248713):
    - Remove explicit settings of textwidth=0 and nobackup, since those are
      already the defaults.
    - Remove explicit setting of viminfo to a subset of the default, thereby
      adding s10 and h.
    - Remove NoDisplay=true from gvim.desktop; vim-gui-common isn't
      installed by default and there's no reason to withhold the menu entry
      from those who have installed it (LP: #3222).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:22:09 +0100