Hi Keith,
My apologies for the delayed response. I had a few conversations with
members of Swift Core and others about their thoughts here. We're treading
into new ground, so some of this we are figuring out as we go.
Having great support for vim is something we want for the Swift project.
The same goes for the multitude of other editors and IDEs out there (both
open source and proprietary). The question that got brought up in my
conversations is whether or not we should look to host support for each of
those as sibling repositories in GitHub next to *swift*,
*swift-package-manager*, etc., or should we take the route of having them
hosted elsewhere and not directly part of the Swift.org <http://swift.org>
project? Taking the latter route could still mean acknowledging a
particular plugin for (say) vim is the recommended and maintained plugin
for Swift support for vim (or whatever editor).
The problem is where to draw the line on what is part of Swift.org
<http://swift.org> and what is not. The entire Swift ecosystem does not
need to be part of the Swift project directly, nor conceivably could it
ever be. The existing vim support in the *swift* repository predates
open source. It was put there by a member of Apple's Swift team because he
was interested in using vim, and that was a natural place to put it. Now
that Swift is open source the repository goes beyond just serving the needs
of a relatively small number of individuals. There will be a natural
interest from the community at large to add editor support for other
popular editors, and the question is whether or not they should all be
positioned as sibling repositories to *swift*.
My instinct at this point tells me "no", simply because we want an open
ecosystem for Swift stuff that goes beyond just what is in the core Swift
project. This allows the core Swift project to focus more on fostering an
ecosystem of tools, and provide a few core technologies like the compiler
and package manager, rather than focusing on providing everything in the
Swift universe. That said, even drawing this line is not always clear.
With this in mind, I propose an alternate direction (for which I encourage
discussion):
- Remove the current support from vim from the *swift* repository.
- Encourage others to setup great vim support on GitHub.
- Call out such great vim support with links from the *swift* repository
or Swift.org <http://swift.org> itself.
Thoughts? The same arguments here apply to editors like Emacs, Sublime
Text, and so on.
Cheers,
Ted
On Jan 3, 2016, at 8:26 PM, Keith Smiley <keithbsmiley@gmail.com> wrote:
Awesome thanks! I'd definitely be interested in helping maintain this
plugin. I can't speak for Kevin but I assume he would be as well.
On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 20:21 Ted kremenek <kremenek@apple.com> wrote:
Hi Keith,
This makes complete sense. I can see why cloning a small self-contained
repository would be ideal for plugin managers.
I'll talk about this with the core team, but I think this seems like a
reasonable direction.
Incidentally, we would need one (or more) active maintainers for the vim
plugin. Dmitri Gribenko was the one on Apple's Swift team most actively
using vim, but I'd also be happy with somebody outside of Apple being the
custodian of this plugin.
Ted
On Jan 3, 2016, at 10:37 AM, Keith Smiley <keithbsmiley@gmail.com> wrote:
Right there are 2 facets to the file hierarchy. The one covered in [2] is
the
standard structure vim expects when loading plugins. The need to be in a
separate repo is for vim plugin managers.
The most popular plugin managers[0][1][2] work by either you cloning, or
specifying a repo containing a plugin to load. This means you would use
something like `apple/swift.vim` in the case of the plugin I'm hoping
for. The
plugin managers then add that cloned directory to vim's runtime path
where it
looks for the structure covered in [2] to be able to load the correct
plugin
files. If that structure doesn't exist at the root of the repo, it has no
effect. Some of the plugin managers[2] do have the ability to specify the
subdirectory of a repo, but even if that was something we were relying on,
having to clone the entire `apple/swift` repo for less than ~10 small
files is
a lot of overhead.
Let me know if I need to elaborate more.
Thanks!
[0]: https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen
[1]: https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim
[2]: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug
--
Keith Smiley
On 01/02, Ted kremenek wrote:
> Hi Keith,
>
> I'm not a vim user, so I'm not certain how the nesting of the vim
support in the main repository is a problem. I looked at [2] and noticed a
requirement for a folder layout, but I didn't see anything obvious to
indicate that this would benefit from being in a separate repository. Can
you elucidate a bit more for my benefit? Note that I'm not saying there is
a benefit; I'm just lacking some context here to understand why a separate
repository is needed. If there is a clear benefit, this is something I'd
happily support and discuss with the rest of the Swift Core members.
>
> Ted
>
> > On Dec 31, 2015, at 12:09 PM, Keith Smiley via swift-dev < >>> swift-dev@swift.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hey all,
> >
> > When swift was open sourced a few of us noticed that there was some
existing
> > vim highlighting support[0]. While it sounds like what's there now
hasn't been
> > kept up to date for a while[1], that brought up the question if
there could
> > ever be a dedicated repository for vim support under the apple github
> > organization.
> >
> > Many vim plugin managers expect a specific folder structure[2] in
order to
> > work correctly. So the current nesting of the vim support in the
main repo
> > isn't ideal. I think it would be hugely beneficial to the members of
the
> > community who would prefer to use vim over any other editor, for
there to be a
> > first party repo similar to rust's[3].
> >
> > I'm not particularly suggesting that this plugin would be supported
by the
> > swift core team. As there are at least a few community swift vim
plugins
> > now[4][5] I would hope that as a community we would be willing and
able to
> > support this plguin. Personally I would love to be part of a unified
effort
> > towards better vim support for Swift!
> >
> >
> > Thoughts? Thanks!
> >
> >
> > [0]: https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/master/utils/vim
> > [1]: https://twitter.com/jckarter/status/672493376856391681
> > [2]: https://robots.thoughtbot.com/writing-vim-syntax-plugins
> > [3]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.vim
> > [4]: https://github.com/keith/swift.vim
> > [5]: https://github.com/kballard/vim-swift
> >
> > --
> > Keith Smiley
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > swift-dev mailing list
> > swift-dev@swift.org
> > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-dev
_______________________________________________
swift-dev mailing list
swift-dev@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-dev
