bug 58002

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 04:45:44PM -0500, Rocco Stanzione wrote:
> I created a launchpad bug:
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/vim/+bug/58002
> that has turned rather unpleasant and unconstructive imo.  I was asked to 
> start a discussion here.
> 
> I have questions for this specific bug and for bugs in general.  For this bug, 
> is there an appropriate solution at all?  My recommendation (hadn't thought 
> of it by the time I decided to wash my hands of the launchpad bug) is to put 
> an empty /etc/skel/.viminfo into the vim package, which would fix this and 
> have no other consequences that I can think of.  Modifying sudoers to always 
> set home was also suggested, but I think that would have some unintended 
> consequences.  I figure the answer to that will determine which package, if 
> any, this bug should be filed against.
> 
> In general, what can we do to prevent this kind of thing?  I'm hard pressed to 
> go what I see as a troublesome bug because somebody says vim's behaving 
> correctly, therefore it's not a bug.  Dennis was hard-pressed to let go what 
> he believed was an invalid bug report.  When in doubt, do what?  When there's 
> apparently a problem where the bug isn't in the package that feels the 
> symptoms, where to file the bug until the solution is decided on?

My opinion:

1. It's fairly rude to repeatedly reject a bug. If a reporter believes
   it to be valid, and his standpoint has any potential validity
   whatever, then mark it as "Wishlist" if you like, or get another
   opinion.  Criticizing a user for continuously "reopening" a bug seems
   wrong, and also counter to precedents in
   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Responses. Better to avoid continuously
   rejecting the bug, IMHO.

2. It is not a bug in vim. That doesn't mean it's not a bug, and it also
   doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed in vim. From a user's
   perspective, it seems to me that anything that can be easily done,
   that results in problems for the user, is a bug.

One way to fix it (as has been suggeested), is to add a .vimrc to
/etc/skel (we'd actually probably need to add a .vim/ with appropriate
files, too, AFAIK). This seems sort of hackish to me.

It's not a bug in vim, but that doesn't mean we can't improve vim by
having it politely check the real vs effective user ids, and compare the
current value of HOME with expected values for the effective user vs the
real user, and issue a warning if they don't match. Just because it's
"not vim's responsibility", doesn't mean that therefore "vim shouldn't
do anything about it".

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/