On 09/02/2015 09:47 PM, James McCoy wrote: > Looks like your system ships with gzipped help files. When you run > vimtutor, plugins aren't loaded. The gzip plugin is what normally > handles uncompressing the help files, but since it isn't loaded Vim just > opens the compressed file and can't find the tag to jump to. Though I now have an explanation of what's going on thanks to James I'm somewhat confused as to how to proceed towards fixing it at this point. The biggest question that now arises is whether the fix should be applied upstream at Vim or more downstream with the Fedora packagers or some combination of both.
I wonder if other systems also compress the Vim help files in this way or if Fedora is the only distro that does that? Even in the latter case I can totally understand why as human readable text is redundant and there is plenty of hard disk space to be saved. After all just about every distro compresses the man pages. Why shouldn't most distros do the same for Vim's help files? One possibility whether this is done upstream at Vim or downstream by the Fedora packagers is to have various plugins loaded when vimtutor is run which will therefore not trigger this bug. A big drawback of this however is that there may be other plugins loaded which may drastically alter the way vimtutor works and the whole (re)learning experience. Another possibility is to take this up with the Fedora packagers and have them rig vimtutor to load the gzip plugin so that the help commands work exactly as expected. At least for Fedora users this would work pretty well. What I feel is probably the best option is to have this fixed upstream at Vim though. I cant imagine it would be all that hard to modify vimtutor to check on startup whether the help pages were compressed and load the gzip plugin if needed. There are many distros out there and odds are that Fedora isn't the first or last distro tempted to compress help files that will make this mistake when packaging Vim. Thus to fix this once and for all and prevent bug reports like this from being filed again and again this is probably the best solution. What are everyone's thoughts? -- -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to vim_dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
