Bug#222138: [RFC] new vim-tiny

Len Sorensen lennartsorensen at ruggedcom.com
Tue Nov 1 18:43:27 UTC 2005


On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 06:25:58PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> Hi Joey and Len,
>   I'm writing to you about bug #222138 (Cc-ed), the bug who ask for
> the re-enabling of the "vim-tiny" package.
> 
> I've reshaped the packaging of vim so that it is possible to have a
> vim-tiny package which:
> (1) is built with a small subset of features
> (2) do not depend on vim huge runtime (~10 Mb) which is now shipped in
>     the new vim-runtime package
> A draft of such packaging is available at:
> http://people.debian.org/~zack/vim/
> 
> Good news:
> 
>   vim-tiny now depends on vim-common (which is much smaller then in the
>   past), ncurses and libc6. The sizes are as follows:
> 
>   $ (dpkg --info vim-tiny*deb; dpkg --info vim-common*deb) | grep ^Inst
>    Installed-Size: 744
>    Installed-Size: 360
> 
>   For a total of 1100 Kb.

A drop of 9MB is certainly of interest.  The product I work on has a
256MB compact flash card, and we currently run with the full vim
installed.  The free space would get a nice increase if we switched to
that.  Of course I also run almost entirely packages from sarge, but I
think I can manage to tweak something to deal with the changes you have
made.

> Bad news:
> 
>   The features compiled in are the "small" subset + a set of features
>   I've considered either features one-can-t-live-without or useful in
>   the base system. The output of :version is attached.
> 
>   Having no runtime has drawbacks, mainly: no help [1], no
>   language-specific syntax highlighting / folding / indentation, no
>   vimtutor, no color schemes, no plugins.

Like Joey I think we would mainly miss syntax highlighting, although I
doubt most of our customers would care.  Only a few use the command line
since the intent is for people to use webmin for most configurations.
The command line is more of a backup and a way to allow some advanced
users to do things that webmin doesn't offer.

> I'm asking for comments especially on three topics:
> 1) does this packaging meet your requirements for vim-tiny?

Sounds excelent to me.

> 2) do you consider the choice of features/no runtime suitable for the
>    vim-tiny package?

I think it sounds quite good.  I certainly have no need for the built in
help (we already strip man pages and most of /usr/share/doc from all
packages as a post build step to reduce the installed size of
everything).

> 3) (Joey: ) are you responsible for the inclusion of packages in the
>    base system? If yes (as I imagine), does vim-tiny + vim-common
>    qualify for inclusion in the base system replacing nvi? The size is
>    doubled (1100 Kb vs 632 kb of nvi), dependencies are the same,
>    features are ... infinitely superior!
> 
> Thanks for your attention.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> [1] to alleviate the issue, we can think at including some dummy help
>     files which points out that installing vim-runtime would solve the
>     problem

I don't know if it matters, but I suppose it might be nice if a user
types vim, expects help and gets some useful information about how to
solve the lack of help.

Great work.  I will go check out your new packages.

Are your vim packages supposed to be 'native' rather than have an
upstream .orig.tar.gz and diff?  Or is this a build mistake?

Len Sorensen




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