The Vim Arch tutorial

These are the simple instructions how to obtain the Vim files through Arch. Use this when you have a reasonably fast internet connection and want to compile Vim yourself. It should work well on any system that supports Arch.

Below is a very brief tutorial on using GNU Arch to check out versions of the Vim archive. Please refer to the Arch tutorial for more information on doing other things with arch. It is quite powerful, for example individual developers can create personal branches off of my archive, without even telling me.

Note: The Arch repository is updated regularly, but not immediately. Vim's Arch repository may be a few days behind the head of development (about the same as the CVS repository). For information on patching Vim with the most up-to-date patches, consult the information on patches

An alternative is using CVS. More about that on the CVS page.

Obtaining Vim through Arch

1. First, get GNU arch. http://regexps.srparish.net/www/ is the main webpage. You want version 1.1 (or newer), the source is http://regexps.srparish.net/src/tla/tla-1.1.tar.gz. If you are running Debian, the 'tla' package in testing or unstable has this version.

2. You should set your personal identifier. I'm not sure this is actually needed, if you don't modify anything.

       tla my-id 'My Full Name <mfn@host.com>'
   

   Arch is a bit picky about the format. It wants it to look like a valid full email address.

3. Tell arch about the Vim archive.

       tla register-archive http://vim-arch.davidb.org/arch/vim-2003
   

4. Extract the latest version of Vim.

       cd ~/work    # or wherever you want it.
       tla get vim@davidb.org--vim-2003/vim--bram--6.2 vim62
   

   The last component is the name of the directory. If you leave it off, arch will choose a long version of the version you are checking out (vim--bram--6.2--versionfix-191 for example).

5. You should now have the latest version of Vim. From within the directory you can do some useful stuff.

       tla changelog | less    # Show change history.
       tla missing             # Show changes in archive not
                               #   applied locally.
       tla update              # Update current to latest in archive.
       tla changes             # Show what's changed in local dir.
       tla changes --diffs     #   and generate diffs.
   
       tla help                # Show all of arch's commands.
       tla update --help       # Show help for specific command.
   

If you have remarks on this page, please contact David Brown (vim at davidb dot org).