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

[Matt Ihlenfield]

Hi Thomas,

> On Saturday, March 13, 2021 5:25 AM, thomas@t-8ch.de <thomas@t-8ch.de> wrote:
>
> 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.

Agreed!

> 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)

OK I'm with you on this now. I wasn't sure how vim would handle multiple
definitions of the same syntax, but I think you're right:
/usr/share/vim/vimfiles seems to be the place to put scripts that you want
to take priority over the ones in the vim package.

I think this patch looks good, but I agree with Jose that it would probably
be good to add a flag that disables installing the vim plugin.

Thanks!

Matt Ihlenfield