Using Vim's native packages feature in Debian packages

Sam Morris sam at robots.org.uk
Tue Dec 13 13:16:13 UTC 2016


I experimented with modifying a package I maintain to use Vim 8's new
packages feature instead of vim-addon-manager. I encountered no serious
problems, and made the following observations:

   1. A (Debian) package can drop files in
      /usr/share/vim/vim80/pack/${debpkg}/{start,opt}/${vimaddon}
   2. If 'start' is used, the vim addon will be loaded automatically (as
      is already done by several Debian packages)
   3. If 'opt' is used then the user has to put 'packadd ${vimaddon}' in
      their .vimrc; this is more like how vim-addon-manager is supposed to
      be used, with users opting in to installed Vim addons
   4. I was not sure how best to depend on Vim 8 or higher. I settled on
      'Depends: vim-common (>= 2:8)'
   5. I had to build-depend on vim-common, and invoke helpztags in my
      install rule in order to generate help tags
   6. Lintian wasn't happy that I shipped a shared library under
      /usr/share

I've attached a patch demonstrating the changes I made:

     debian/NEWS                            |  8 +++++++
     debian/README                          | 10 ---------
     debian/command-t.yaml.in               |  4 ----
     debian/control                         |  5 ++++-
     debian/install                         |  6 ++---
     debian/postinst                        | 40 ----------------------------------
     debian/prerm                           | 39 ---------------------------------
     debian/rules                           |  6 ++---
     debian/vim-command-t.lintian-overrides |  1 +
     9 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 101 deletions(-)

    Dropping the maintainer scripts felt good! :)

    If it was decided to deprecate the use of vim-addon-manager in favour
    of Vim's native packages feature, /usr/{share,lib}/vim/packages could
    be added to packpath,     and Debian packages could ship their addons
    inside these directories, under pack/${debpkg}/{start,opt} (depending
    on whether the addons should be enabled automatically or not).

    (Please CC me in followups)

    -- 
    Sam Morris <    https://robots.org.uk/>
    PGP: rsa4096/CAAA AA1A CA69 A83A 892B  1855 D20B 4202 5CDA 27B9
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