Bug#1021812: powerline: Missing vim bindings

[Rob Gibson]

Package: powerline
Version: 2.8.1-4
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: nos...@gmail.com

Dear Maintainer,

Upon installing Powerline and successfully integrating it into Bash, I looked to the existing README.Debian and added the three suggested lines to my .vimrc. Vim launched but did not display the expected status line output. Instead, the default status line was displayed.

I attempted to execute the python code from the README manually to attempt to collect debug information, and the Python interpreter crashed and indicated that it couldn't find the bindings for vim. Python was looking in various directories in dist-packages, but I then attempted to find any bindings in /usr/share/powerline/ where I had found the Bash bindings.

The vim folder does not exist in this binary package or in the 2.8.3 build in testing. The files do exist in the source repository on Salsa.

Was this not included because the default vim installation doesn't contain Python support? Is there an alternate package of Powerline which contains the vim bindings? Could they be enabled in the default package in a way which doesn't break anything for folks using vim.basic or vim.tiny while still allowing vim.nox and the other variants which contain Python support?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.5
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-18-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_FIRMWARE_WORKAROUND
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages powerline depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.77
ii init-system-helpers 1.60
ii libc6 2.31-13+deb11u4
ii python3 3.9.2-3
ii python3-powerline 2.8.1-4

Versions of packages powerline recommends:
ii fonts-powerline 2.8.1-4

Versions of packages powerline suggests:
pn powerline-doc <none>
pn python3-i3ipc <none>
ii vim-addon-manager 0.5.10

-- debconf information excluded

[Samuel Henrique]

Hello Rob,

I think the decision not to ship vim bindings happened before I was
the maintainer of the package, but your suspicion is correct regarding
Debian's vim not being built with python support. I don't think the
bindings would work.

What I use on my machines is vim-airline, which you can install using
apt or pretty much any vim plugin manager.

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vim-airline
https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline

I don't think it can be enabled by default since vim-airline doesn't
enable itself automatically. We could add vim-airline to powerline's
Suggests, and mention somewhere that the bindings for vim are in that
package (not sure where yet), but it's worth noting that they are two
separate projects with their own codebase each (although they look
pretty much the same).

Thank you for reporting this,

--
Samuel Henrique <samueloph>