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

[address@hidden]

Hi Matt,

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 :-)

Thomas