Bug#864074: defaults.vim: broken configuration

[James McCoy]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 11:38:40PM +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> James, did you intend to send this just to me?

I didn't.

> To be on safe side, I reply to 
> you only, but I really think this should also go to the bug report.

Agreed. I'll bounce the last two messages to the bug.

> James McCoy - 18.07.17, 20:21:
> > On Sat, Jul 08, 2017 at 11:36:07PM +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > > James McCoy - 05.07.17, 21:09:
> […]
> > > My order wasn´t complete. I think it should be:
> > > 
> > > 1. Global vim configuration
> > > 2. /etc/vim/vimrc.local
> > > 3. $HOME/.vimrc
> > > 4. defaults.vim
> > > 
> > > so that defaults.vim can only ever set any setting that has *not* been set
> > > by any of the other configuration files.
> > 
> > Then you would actually want defaults.vim to be first, so that anything
> > else set overrides it.  You can do exactly that by putting this in your
> > /etc/vim/vimrc.local:
> > 
> >     " Explicitly source defaults.vim so you can override its settings
> >     source $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim
> >     " Prevent it from being loaded again later if the user doesn't have
> >     " a vimrc
> >     let skip_defaults_vim = 1
> 
> And all that just to restore some sanity to the VIM configuration… well…

I understand the feeling, but I also dislike deviating from default
configurations since that makes it harder for people to switch between
systems.  That's why I've suggested raising the issue upstream.

> > > It is completely unintuitive that defaults.vim overwrites settings in
> > > vimrc.local by default. If I write "set mouse=" in there, I mean it. I
> > > really dislike software that pretends it knows better than me unless I
> > > tell that software to stop that behavior.
> > > 
> > > Never *ever* overwrite user/admin made settings.
> > 
> > Yes, that was another part that Bram just punted on when he was deciding
> > how defaults.vim would work.
> 
> I may look at a vim fork that doesn´t adopt this nonsense.

Neovim bakes in saner defaults, which avoids all this jumping through
hoops when you want to deviate from them.

> But the issue with this is: Now by default the VIM configuration is *broken* in 
> several ways which I described on *every* newly installed *or* upgraded Debian 
> system. Which needs adapting the configuration every newly installed system.
> 
> For *what* benefit?

Many of the changes *are* useful to enable, but 'mouse' in particular
was a poor choice and the interaction with system-wide vimrc was an even
poorer one.

Cheers,
-- 
James
GPG Key: 4096R/91BF BF4D 6956 BD5D F7B7  2D23 DFE6 91AE 331B A3DB