How to package additional .vim files?

[James Vega]

On 5/25/07, Martin Pitt <mpitt at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi vim maintainers!

Hi Martin.  Sorry for taking so long to get back to you.

> I just packaged editmoin [1], a tool I can't live without. :)
>
> This also provides a moin.vim syntax file. However, I wonder where
> would be the correct place to ship this. Currently I use
>
>   /usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/syntax/

There are basically two approaches one can take when providing files for
Vim in their packages.

1) Distribute the file in /usr/share/$yourpackage and instruct the user
   to link the file in their ~/.vim directory.  This provides the
   benefit of keeping the file definitely in directories that belong to
   your package and the file is not automatically sourced by Vim (which
   can sometimes be problematic with multi-user systems that don't all
   want to use the installed scripts).
2) Distribute the file in /usr/share/vim/addons.  This directory is
   automatically included in Vim's 'runtimepath' (for the Debian
   package) and will be automatically sourced by Vim if the proper
   filetype detection is setup.

For either of these scenarios, it's best to follow the typical
runtimepath directory structure.  In your case, the syntax file would
either be in /usr/share/editmoin/syntax/moin.vim or
/usr/share/vim/addons/syntax/moin.vim.

I would also recommend looking into the vim-addon-manager package and
the proposed policy included in its /usr/share/doc directory.  I would
like to see this policy enforced for Lenny as it would help prevent bugs
such as #427647.

James