UVF exception to include vim 7 in dapper

subscribed ubuntu-archive to this bug as this is in main.

Why exactly do you want this updated? Could you add at least a changelog here?

Debian has vim 7 in experimental already btw

Vim 7 adds some atractive features. Once Dapper ships with vim 6.4 it will be 'stuck' with an old version for 5 years. In a way it is similar to UVF exceptions for firefox.

Changes since vim 6.4

- Spell checking support for about 50 languages
- Intelligent completion for C, HTML, Ruby, Python, PHP, etc.
- Tab pages, each containing multiple windows
- Undo branches: never accidentally lose text again
- Vim script supports Lists and Dictionaries (similar to Python)
- Vim script profiling
- Improved Unicode support
- Highlighting of cursor line, cursor column and matching braces
- Translated manual pages support.
- Internal grep; works on all platforms, searches compressed files
- Browsing remote directories, zip and tar archives
- Printing multi-byte text

Some of the new features (intelligent completion, undo branches) are definitely so delicious it would be a shame not to have them in dapper.

I'm afraid I think this is precisely the kind of proposed update that doesn't qualify for a UVF exception. It's a big new feature release with substantial amounts of new code that will need to be tested and may well contain new bugs. Dapper is better off with the more stable, albeit older version.

I don't think this has the same concerns as Firefox at all. Firefox is exposed to all sorts of interesting vulnerabilities from the Internet whose security patches are extraordinarily difficult to backport; for that reason we tend to make grudging exceptions for it even relatively late in the release cycle. Vim doesn't remotely fall into the same category.

I'm looking forward to things like undo branches as much as any other Vim user, and the improved Unicode support will probably help me out a lot when working with .po files, but these improvements can wait until Edgy.

Agreed.

Could we at least make a vim7 package so that we still have a choice and the users (that know and want) get vim7 packaged from Ubuntu instead of from murky sources?

vim is a complicated package that produces several binary packages; splitting off vim7 would set us up for upgrade difficulties later. I'd rather wait until edgy opens, import vim 7 from Debian there, and allow that to be pulled into dapper-backports for those who want it.

Right, good idea.

The bug is no longer vailid as far as I'm concerned.

Rejecting UVF exception request, then.

It might not qualify as a UVF exception, but I don't think that's a good reason to drop it.
If need be, consider it a new package. Allow the current vim 6.x & vim 7 to both be installed.
This is too important a package to leave out of a release that's supposed to have a 5 year lifespan.

-Bruce

Bruce, I already addressed your comments above.