Debian Packaging Policy for Vim
Copyright © 2007, 2008 Stefano Zacchiroli
Copyright © 2021 James McCoy
- Table of Contents
- 1. Vim Addon Packaging in a Nutshell
- 2. Vim Packaging
- 3. Packaging of Vim Addons
- 3.1. Addon Structure
- 3.2. Addon Packages
- 4. Tools
1. Vim Addon Packaging in a Nutshell
 | This section contains a brief howto of what to do to package a Vim addon (plugin, syntax definition, ...) in Debian. This section is not the full policy nor the guidelines for doing that; have a look at the remainder of this document for such information. |
So you've found on vim.org a cool extra feature for your beloved editor (Vim) and you want it to be packaged in Debian. It's as easy as implementing the following 4 steps:
create an architecture: all .deb binary package called vim-ADDON, where ADDON is the addon name. See Section 3.2 for more info on this.
make your package ship all the files composing your addon (usually .vim and .txt files) under /usr/share/vim-ADDON/. The files should be shipped as a file and directory tree isomorphic to what you want to see in a runtime Vim directory. So if for example the addon documentation says that something should be installed as plugin/foo.vim then you should ship it as /usr/share/vim-ADDON/plugin/foo.vim. See Section 3.1 for more info on this.
create a debian/vim-ADDON.vim-addon specifying the files and/or directories making up the addon. If neovim is also supported, create a corresponding debian/vim-ADDON.neovim-addon for it, or a symlink if the same set of files are used. See the dh_vim-addon manual page, in the dh-vim-addon package, for more details.
add Depends: ${vim-addon:Depends} to the binary package stanzas.