Re: [PATCH 1/2] Distribute vim syntax highlighting

[Jose E. Marchesi]

> On Sa, 2021-03-13T04:13+0000, Matt Ihlenfield wrote:
>> It seems like the typical way languages support highlighting in vim is to 
>> submit
>> a patch with their highlighter to be included in vim's source repo, or to
>> provide the language support as a plugin that can be installed with
>> Vundle/Pathogen/etc.
>
> Providing a dedicated plugin, that has to be installed manually, makes more 
> sense
> for big chunks of functionality that should not be enabled unconditionally or
> where the upstream project does not provide syntax definitions themselves.
>
>> I submitted a pull request that was accepted today, so
>> poke.vim (and the filetype entry) should eventually be shipped with the vim
>> runtime.
>
> Nice!
>
>> I wonder if it would be better for that to be the default way to support
>> Poke syntax highlighting in vim? I think grabbing poke.vim from the poke 
>> sources
>> would always be the best way to get the most recent version, as it could
>> take some time to get updates in to vim, but for most users I would think the
>> version shipped with vim would suffice?
>
> Poke is a fairly specialized tool that people may install via
> backports or custom packages to get the latest version (or any at all).
> These installations will be newer than the also-installed vim installation
> leading to a mismatch of syntax definitions, probably missing newer language
> features.
>
> For exmaple in my /usr/share/vim/vimfiles I have vim definitions installed 
> that
> are provided directly by the upstream packages:
> notmuch, augeas, lilypond, meson, PKGBUILD, cmake, ninja, protobuf, ragel.
>
> These tools use all fairly specific syntaxes that are prone to change.
> For meson and ninja there are actually two sets of definitions installed.
> One from vim and one from the package itself.
> (The ones from the packages shadow the ones from vim)
>
> The only advantages I see for distributing the files via vim directly is that
> * users without poke installed will have highlighting.
> * users with poke but not vim installed won't have unused files on their
> machine.
>
> I'll let Jose and you decide :-)

I think it is useful to distribute the vim files in poke tarbal
releases, for the reasons you highlight.

But then, I am not that sure if it is useful to actually install them,
given vim will now distribute them.

If an user has vim installed which is recent enough to include support
for poke and then she installs a poke tarball that ships with a more
recent version of poke.vim, which version will be effective?

Distros may have a problem with this if they distribute a recent enough
version of vim.  In case we install the vim files, we need a configure
flag to disable it.

Also, what about the concerns I raised about the layout of the installed
files?

Matt, you are the maintainer for the vim support in poke, so this is on
you :)