The future of the Vim project

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Christian Brabandt

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Aug 9, 2023, 6:12:41 AM8/9/23
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Hi,
I started making a few changes to continue with Vim. This is the current
status:

- Access to the github organization is possible and Ken and me have been
granted admin rights by Brams family, so we can continue with Github.
(Thanks @Fokke!)

- I invited a few more members to join the Vim organization: Yegappan
Lakshmanan, Dominique Pellé, @mattn and @zeertzjq who have been
contributed to Vim in the past. Congratulations and welcome guys! ;)

- People from the github organization should also have access to
huntr.dev (https://huntr.dev/repos/vim/vim/) where security problems
are being reported. We'll need to take a look there.

- I merged the first 2 commits. As mentioned elsewhere, for now I will
try to merge only bug fixes, security related fixes, documentation
updates and other clear improvements. For the main source of Vim I'll
therefore like to have approval from the other project members before
merging anything yet. Please expect some bumps here, we need a bit of
time until we know how to properly handle all of this (and it may be
subject to change, when we all agree of a better method).

- After we have gone through the current backlog, I'd like to get a Vim
9.1 maintenance release ready, until then we should continue with
incrementing the minor patch version. After the release, I am thinking
about moving to a more modern approach, similar to how Neovim is doing
it. But as discussed elsewhere, this may have some consequences for
the various subprojects: vim-win32-installer, vim-appimage, macVim, so
not sure what will be the best way.

- I have access to the OSDN.net project page and am able to edit the
vim.org homepage. However for various reasons, we may have to move the
Vim homepage elsewhere. More on that further down.

- Bram was owner of the all of the mailing lists. I don't know yet how
he managed this and how to request access specifically for
vim-announce and vim-mac (is this actually still used?) Does anybody
have a contact to the googlegroups admins?

- The mailing lists vim-dev and vim-use are currently managed by myself,
Tony Mechelynk, John Beckett, Ben Schmidt and Ben Fritz (of whom I
think the last two are no longer active at least for the Vim project,
CC'ing them to see if they are still interested in managing this)

- The Vim Domain is managed by @sec (CC'ed). Can you please confirm, you
will be taking care of extending the domains (I think this is vim.org,
vim8.org, vim9.org and possibly iccf-holland.org)?

- I don't have access yet to the main Vim FTP Server. Currently checking
with Brams family if they know the credentials. (CC'ed)

- I am reaching out to all maintainers of the runtime files, to find out
if they have sent anything directly to Bram, which may otherwise be
lost. (to be done).

Regarding the Vim Homepage, as you may all know, we have had problems
with the stability of it for the past months, in particular the
connection to the MySQL Server (I am also currently unable to access the
vim project page directly, as osdn.net/projects/vim seems to be down for
me, but I doubt that this page is actually being used by anybody). It is
currently run by OSDN.net as offered by Shuji Sado (former CEO) since
2018. Unfortunately, OSDN.net is apparently now being owned by OSChina
and we currently do not have any support by OSDN.net or OSChina teams.
@Shuji, thank you for maintaining the Vim Website since 2018 and all the
best for the future!

I've reached out to OSChina regarding what their plans are, but haven't
received any answers yet. Therefore I am also considering to move the
Vim homepage to another provider. A good friend of mine, Marc Schöchlin
offered to take care of the hosting. The Vim project is very thankful
for the kind offer!

Please note: This is just a consideration however, nothing has been
decided yet.

The hosting consists of the following:
- PHP Files with access to a MySQL Database. I think it is currently
using PHP 5, which seems to have reached end-of-life.
- Vims Source in form of a Mercurial repository (which is mirrored from
https://hg.256bit.org/vim). Is anybody actually using the mercurial
repository (except for Tony ;)) ?
- Sourceforge (where the vim homepage was hosted until 2018) recently
announced to migrate to php7 in 2 weeks. But I don't know, if this is
supported by the Vim homepage (at least https://vim.sourceforge.io/
does not seem to work with PHP 7 when testing using:
https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Project%20Web%20Services/#upgrading-from-php-5-net-subdomains)
- expected traffic: 200-500k/moths page visits
- Since I have access to the OSDN Shell Server, I can create a DB dump
and move the content elsewhere, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Once the hosting has been settled and we have proper contacts, I'll
share the account credentials with the team. I can't do it right now,
since this requires support from OSDN.net which we are currently
missing.

@Sec Please be aware that we need to move the Vim Domains if we decide
to move the homepage.

In the past, I have discussed with Bram to open-source the homepage, so
that we will be able to take contributions and be able to keep it
up-to-date and maybe have it more modern looking. However Bram did not
want that, worrying to leak any sensitive information (or make it more
easily discoverable any potential problems). That is certainly a valid
point, so don't know how to handle it yet.

That should be it for now, i hope I did not forget anything noteworthy.

Let me know what you think.

Best,
Christian
--
Was deprimierend ist: Du bist wie alle anderen. Was tröstlich ist:
Alle anderen sind wie du.
-- Johannes Groß

Christ van Willegen

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Aug 9, 2023, 6:30:38 AM8/9/23
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Hi,

On Wed, Aug 9, 2023 at 12:12 PM Christian Brabandt <cbl...@256bit.org> wrote:
> - After we have gone through the current backlog, I'd like to get a Vim
> 9.1 maintenance release ready, until then we should continue with
> incrementing the minor patch version. After the release, I am thinking
> about moving to a more modern approach, similar to how Neovim is doing
> it.

I think this is a sane decision. There are lots of PRs still open,
some have been
for a long time. I'm trying to lower your work load there by loking at what I
think I can sanely decide is 'good', but that's mostly tests, code changes,
text changes etc. I'm not well versed in syntax files...

> - I am reaching out to all maintainers of the runtime files, to find out
> if they have sent anything directly to Bram, which may otherwise be
> lost. (to be done).

In the future, doing this by PR seems a logical way forward.

We _do_ need automatied test for syntax files, though, to prevent breakage
and have a way to decide what syntax highlighting should 'look like' before
it's included. I know Bram started this, but I'm not sure of the current status.

I hope we will be able to sustain the community without Bram, but at them
moment I think we can continue for quite some time 'in his spirit'.

Christ van Willegen

Yegappan Lakshmanan

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Aug 9, 2023, 10:12:48 AM8/9/23
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Thanks Christian for putting this together.

On Wed, Aug 9, 2023 at 3:12 AM Christian Brabandt <cbl...@256bit.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I started making a few changes to continue with Vim. This is the current
> status:
>
> - Access to the github organization is possible and Ken and me have been
> granted admin rights by Brams family, so we can continue with Github.
> (Thanks @Fokke!)
>
> - I invited a few more members to join the Vim organization: Yegappan
> Lakshmanan, Dominique Pellé, @mattn and @zeertzjq who have been
> contributed to Vim in the past. Congratulations and welcome guys! ;)
>

Thanks.

>
> - People from the github organization should also have access to
> huntr.dev (https://huntr.dev/repos/vim/vim/) where security problems
> are being reported. We'll need to take a look there.
>
> - I merged the first 2 commits. As mentioned elsewhere, for now I will
> try to merge only bug fixes, security related fixes, documentation
> updates and other clear improvements. For the main source of Vim I'll
> therefore like to have approval from the other project members before
> merging anything yet. Please expect some bumps here, we need a bit of
> time until we know how to properly handle all of this (and it may be
> subject to change, when we all agree of a better method).
>

Should we look at the outstanding PRs and tag which ones are possible
candidates for the 9.1 release?

>
> - After we have gone through the current backlog, I'd like to get a Vim
> 9.1 maintenance release ready, until then we should continue with
> incrementing the minor patch version. After the release, I am thinking
> about moving to a more modern approach, similar to how Neovim is doing
> it. But as discussed elsewhere, this may have some consequences for
>

Agreed. This is a more scalable approach.

Regards,
Yegappan

Christian Brabandt

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Aug 9, 2023, 10:47:03 AM8/9/23
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On Mi, 09 Aug 2023, Yegappan Lakshmanan wrote:

> Should we look at the outstanding PRs and tag which ones are possible
> candidates for the 9.1 release?

Good idea, yes please.

Best,
Christian
--
Commitment, n.:
[The difference between involvement and] Commitment can be
illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was
involved, the pig was committed.

Yee Cheng Chin

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Aug 9, 2023, 1:08:47 PM8/9/23
to vim...@googlegroups.com
Regarding the vim_mac mailing list, it's not very active, but I do see people posting there once in a while. It's usually a mix of issues / questions between MacVim and Vim (on macOS) as people usually conflate the two as the same thing. For MacVim, most discussions I do are usually on GitHub these days, but it seems that some people still prefer a mailing list format. If it's not too much trouble I think we could keep it.

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John Beckett

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Aug 10, 2023, 2:07:42 AM8/10/23
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Thanks for taking this on Christian. I can't help much but let me know if there is something I might be able to handle.

I advise making things as simple as possible and dumping "nice to have" features. I think you've got the Mercurial repo running on automatic, but while I love Mercurial, it's just one more thing to think about and I would dump it. Similarly, sorry but FTP should go.

Surely Sourceforge is no longer needed? Currently https://vim.sourceforge.io/ tells me "The Vim website has moved, go to www.vim.org" which is all that's needed. It seems to be trying to do a redirect which is not needed.

The Vim Tips wiki is inactive and obsolete but I put the news about Bram on the main page.

Re github procedures, please be very conservative and skip good ideas and anything else that adds to complexity. Instead, focus on small and almost-guaranteed-not-to-break changes with at least two trusted people checking each before going live. I think you suggested that. Perhaps in a few months after things have settled down, more adventurous changes could be considered.

John Beckett

mattn

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Aug 10, 2023, 8:14:55 AM8/10/23
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Christian, you should have the rights for vim project on OSDN.
If you want to continue to use OSDN, and want to add members, please refer following URL.


And click "add member".

Thanks.

2023年8月10日木曜日 15:07:42 UTC+9 John Beckett:

ciu...@gmail.com

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Aug 10, 2023, 11:28:44 AM8/10/23
to vim_dev
Hi Cristian --

I've helped with the Vim project in the past, let me know if I can help with hosting, release testing, Mac builds testing, Vim.org site (PHP, MySQL, etc. woes), or GitHub setup (e.g. consultation on permissions, project management, actions, etc.).  Daily use of MacVim, and Vim native on macOS and Ubuntu Linux (various releases).

My own personal and business websites run various things on top of PHP/MySQL -- upgraded all from PHP5 to PHP7.4 and now PHP8.1; MySQL also needs to be updated if you go from PHP5 to PHP8.1 - note that PHP7 is also deprecated.  Let me know how I can help -- for starters, I can share the Dockerfiles that I use for hosting my stuff (e.g. Piwigo, Roundcube Mail, Bolt, etc.).  I would suggest moving the hosting from metal to Docker for easier testing, troubleshooting, and management.

Happy to oblige on anything the Vim crew needs.

pr3d4t0r (aka Eugene Ciurana)

Christian Brabandt

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Aug 10, 2023, 11:33:12 AM8/10/23
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On Do, 10 Aug 2023, mattn wrote:

> Christian, you should have the rights for vim project on OSDN.
> If you want to continue to use OSDN, and want to add members, please refer
> following URL.
>
> https://osdn.net/projects/vim/memberlist
>
> And click "add member".

Yes, it is working now, previously, the webpage only returned HTTP 500.

In the meantime OSChina replied and wanted to look at the connection
problems. We'll see how it goes on then.


Best,
Christian
--
Every time you manage to close the door on Reality, it comes in through the
window.

Christian Brabandt

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Aug 10, 2023, 11:34:20 AM8/10/23
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Thanks for the offer, I may come back to it. There is currently no
pressure, and OSDN/OSChina hasn't announced when to migrate to PHP 7
(unlike Sourceforge, where we were previously hosted, but which is not
used anymore).


Best,
Christian
--
How many hardware guys does it take to change a light bulb?

"Well the diagnostics say it's fine buddy, so it's a software problem."

mattn

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Aug 10, 2023, 11:58:52 AM8/10/23
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I suggest moving to another hosting server, the OSDN console has lots of errors. Perhaps Christian should be able to export the DB.

2023年8月11日金曜日 0:34:20 UTC+9 Christian Brabandt:

Bodo Eichstädt

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Aug 11, 2023, 11:50:17 AM8/11/23
to vim_dev

Hi Christian, 

I can offer two things

Christian Brabandt schrieb am Mittwoch, 9. August 2023 um 12:12:41 UTC+2:
Hi,
I started making a few changes to continue with Vim. This is the current
status:


- I have access to the OSDN.net project page and am able to edit the
vim.org homepage. However for various reasons, we may have to move the
Vim homepage elsewhere. More on that further down.

see below 
 

- The Vim Domain is managed by @sec (CC'ed). Can you please confirm, you
will be taking care of extending the domains (I think this is vim.org,
vim8.org, vim9.org and possibly iccf-holland.org)?

vim.org was registered by Sven Guckes in 1997 and in his name until now.
Sadly  Sven passed away last year, but we, the ISP and hackerspace of Sven's choise, in-berlin.de holding and preserving Sven's legacy. I had a request for a vim.org domain transfer some while ago. I could assist in doing so at some point in time.

2) We, ISP in-berlin.de could offer hosting on various degree. We are a non-profit hoster, only serving privat people and non-profit Organisations. We do domain, webspace, server / co-location, VPS, AS, IP-Exchange etc and various services for other parties. Like in Germany CCC, sponsoring Thor nodes, growing our  community-ix.net and many more.

Happy to help you and forward your need to our board for decision making.

Bodo

Christian Brabandt

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Aug 12, 2023, 3:48:34 AM8/12/23
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On Fr, 11 Aug 2023, Bodo Eichstädt wrote:

> I can offer two things
>
> Christian Brabandt schrieb am Mittwoch, 9. August 2023 um 12:12:41 UTC+2:
>
> Hi,
> I started making a few changes to continue with Vim. This is the current
> status:
>
>
> - I have access to the OSDN.net project page and am able to edit the
> vim.org homepage. However for various reasons, we may have to move the
> Vim homepage elsewhere. More on that further down.
>
>
> see below 
>  
>
>
> - The Vim Domain is managed by @sec (CC'ed). Can you please confirm, you
> will be taking care of extending the domains (I think this is vim.org,
> vim8.org, vim9.org and possibly iccf-holland.org)?
>
>
> vim.org was registered by Sven Guckes in 1997 and in his name until now.
> Sadly  Sven passed away last year, but we, the ISP and hackerspace of Sven's
> choise, in-berlin.de holding and preserving Sven's legacy. I had a request for
> a vim.org domain transfer some while ago. I could assist in doing so at some
> point in time.

Yes, @sec told me basically the same. It's sad that two of the most
well-known main Vim persons passed away in such a short time (and we now
we also need to take care of the Vim Domain). I believe there are a few
other Vim domains like vim8.org and vim9.org that were directly
registered by Bram. Even so we are not using those domains directly, we
need to take care of the legal stuff here together with Brams family.

>
> 2) We, ISP in-berlin.de could offer hosting on various degree. We are a
> non-profit hoster, only serving privat people and non-profit Organisations. We
> do domain, webspace, server / co-location, VPS, AS, IP-Exchange etc and various
> services for other parties. Like in Germany CCC, sponsoring Thor nodes, growing
> our  community-ix.net and many more.
>
> Happy to help you and forward your need to our board for decision making.

Thank you. I already received a few offers for hosting the Vim.org
domain. I'll make a decision about this soon.


Best,
Christian
--
Money is the root of all wealth.

Lauriano Elmiro Duarte

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Aug 13, 2023, 5:02:25 AM8/13/23
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Greetings everyone,

I'm new to vim, but I'm willing to help as I can.

I can help with translations and any other support.

I work as a systems administrator.

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Ben Fritz

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Aug 13, 2023, 10:26:35 AM8/13/23
to vim_dev
> [snip]

>
> - I am reaching out to all maintainers of the runtime files, to find out
>   if they have sent anything directly to Bram, which may otherwise be
>   lost. (to be done).
>
> [snip]

>
> That should be it for now, i hope I did not forget anything noteworthy.
>
> Let me know what you think.
>

Thanks for the CC and I'm certainly very sad to have seen the news about Bram.

And thank you Christian for taking on this leadership role. Yegappan,
Dominique, mattn, and zeertzjq: thanks to you guys too. It's comforting
to see Vim remains in good hands.

You're right, I have gone mostly inactive on the project and it probably
makes sense to take me off the mailing list managers group. You don't
*need* to take me off it, but I will probably not become active enough
to be an effective moderator/list manager in the near-term. In the
longer term, if I do end up finding time to become more active, I work
in InfoSec so I might be able to contribute to the huntr.dev project. I
wasn't aware that existed! I'll reach out on that at some other time.

Something I don't see mentioned in this email is the scan.coverity.com
project for Vim at https://scan.coverity.com/projects/vim. It looks like
you and Dominique are currently the project admins there, do we need to
add a few more (probably everyone in the GitHub organization)? I wonder
if it is possible to set the organization as admin over there, since
there is a "login with GitHub" feature.

I am still interested in maintaining the TOhtml plugin for which I am
the official maintainer, if Vim's development model continues to have
separate maintainers for the distributed plugins. However I will
understand if it is given over to someone more active (or if project
leadership wants a co-maintainer) as I have not been able to contribute
more than a couple bugfixes for the last few years. I have not sent any
unreleased updates to Bram.

If Vim development moves away from separate maintainers for the various
plugins, or if someone ends up taking over, I have been maintaining
TOhtml over at SourceForge where there is still free Mercurial hosting.
This project contains some automated testing (using Vim's own test
framework) which I have been slowly building with each feature addition
and bugfix, and should be part of however the script is maintained in
the future: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vim-tohtml/

If we continue with individual developers, how does the project want to
continue receiving updates? In the past, I would email a zip file
directly to Bram containing whole files. Sometimes I would CC the vim_dev
list. I believe this is how most plugin maintainers were contributing
updates. For now, is it best to just email whole files to vim_dev in the
same way? My apologies if this has already been addressed in another
thread. I didn't see anything while  browsing through the list to check,
but as noted above I haven't been very active of late so I may have
missed something.

Christian Brabandt

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Aug 13, 2023, 1:02:56 PM8/13/23
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Ben,

On So, 13 Aug 2023, Ben Fritz wrote:

> Thanks for the CC and I'm certainly very sad to have seen the news about Bram.
>
> And thank you Christian for taking on this leadership role. Yegappan,
> Dominique, mattn, and zeertzjq: thanks to you guys too. It's comforting
> to see Vim remains in good hands.

We'll try our best.

> You're right, I have gone mostly inactive on the project and it probably
> makes sense to take me off the mailing list managers group. You don't
> *need* to take me off it, but I will probably not become active enough
> to be an effective moderator/list manager in the near-term. In the
> longer term, if I do end up finding time to become more active, I work
> in InfoSec so I might be able to contribute to the huntr.dev project. I
> wasn't aware that existed! I'll reach out on that at some other time.

Sounds good. It's always sad, to see some long-time contributors
missing, so if you ever want to become more active, you are certainly
welcomed back ;)

> Something I don't see mentioned in this email is the scan.coverity.com
> project for Vim at https://scan.coverity.com/projects/vim. It looks like
> you and Dominique are currently the project admins there, do we need to
> add a few more (probably everyone in the GitHub organization)? I wonder
> if it is possible to set the organization as admin over there, since
> there is a "login with GitHub" feature.

Yeah, I did not mention this because I forgot. Anyhow, Dominique and me
are also admins, so we should be good here.

> I am still interested in maintaining the TOhtml plugin for which I am
> the official maintainer, if Vim's development model continues to have
> separate maintainers for the distributed plugins. However I will
> understand if it is given over to someone more active (or if project
> leadership wants a co-maintainer) as I have not been able to contribute
> more than a couple bugfixes for the last few years. I have not sent any
> unreleased updates to Bram.

I haven't seen any complaints/issues for the TOhtml plugin, so I think
we are good here, even so it may need some love to e.g. support popups
or virtual text. Not sure if this would be easily addable to a plugin
(or even makes sense).

> If Vim development moves away from separate maintainers for the various
> plugins, or if someone ends up taking over, I have been maintaining
> TOhtml over at SourceForge where there is still free Mercurial hosting.
> This project contains some automated testing (using Vim's own test
> framework) which I have been slowly building with each feature addition
> and bugfix, and should be part of however the script is maintained in
> the future: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vim-tohtml/
>
> If we continue with individual developers, how does the project want to
> continue receiving updates? In the past, I would email a zip file
> directly to Bram containing whole files. Sometimes I would CC the vim_dev
> list. I believe this is how most plugin maintainers were contributing
> updates. For now, is it best to just email whole files to vim_dev in the
> same way? My apologies if this has already been addressed in another
> thread. I didn't see anything while  browsing through the list to check,
> but as noted above I haven't been very active of late so I may have
> missed something.

I don't want to change the current runtime maintainership at all. I
think it is fine. The only thing I am considering is to make
bulk-updates easier, even so this adds a bit of burden to the individual
runtime files maintainers. But I hope that is okay. In any case, if you
want to send updates, I'd recommend to send PR at the github
organization, but sending complete files to vim-dev or me will also
work.


Thanks Ben and hope to hear back from you ;)
Christian
--
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that
procession but carrying a banner.
-- Mark Twain

Benjamin Fritz

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Aug 13, 2023, 4:03:49 PM8/13/23
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On Sun, Aug 13, 2023 at 12:02 PM Christian Brabandt <cbl...@256bit.org> wrote:
>
> I haven't seen any complaints/issues for the TOhtml plugin, so I think
> we are good here, even so it may need some love to e.g. support popups
> or virtual text. Not sure if this would be easily addable to a plugin
> (or even makes sense).
>

Easy to add? No, probably not. But I would certainly like to include it
sometime:

  https://sourceforge.net/p/vim-tohtml/issues/29/

Patches welcome, especially if they come with a test so I don't need to
figure out how to do it. :)

I think virtual text and other such text properties should probably be
off by default with an option to turn them on, although that may make
the interaction with various other features more complex.
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