This year edition of the Debian conference, DebConf6, will be held in Oaxtepec, Mexico, from May 14th to May 22nd 2006. Before the conference, development teams can meet at the Debcamp to work together for a whole week, from May 6th to May 13th 2006.

We, pkg-vim developers are trying to organize our work there. This page summarizes this effort.

Topics

Debcamp is meant to be a productive environment for Debian work. As such, in advance planning of work topics is required. This is a tentative list of vim related topics that will be worked on at Debcamp 2006:

BSP

at the time of writing vim has more than 80 outstanding bugs of all severities, do I need to say anything more?

Sarge upgrade paths
many changes have been applied to the vim package from sarge. Upgrade path from sarge to etch need to be tested, but have never been AFAIK.
vim policy
a draft policy does exist for packaging vim related stuff, but is neither actively used nor has the needed tools ready for use (notably vim-install). Work on both the policy and the needed tools is needed.
vim7

the release of vim7 is just around the corner, it is worth working on the vim7 packaging already drafted by NorbertTretkowski and documenting which patch will be no longer needed and which bugs will be closed by the release (keeping the BTS informed of this). Moreover, understanding the impact of new features on the packaging would be a valuable outcome, in particular:

spell checking

vim7 will feature spell checking. Word lists can be generated from some dictionaries format already available in Debian but that can't be directly used by vim. Study/implementation of syncing mechansims among the vim word list formats and that others is needed.

aap & agide

A-A-P & agide are two tools intimately related to vim. The former is packaged in Debian but looking at the BTS seems not actively maintained. The latter is not packages at all. Consider working on the two packages, involving the current maintainer in the pkg-vim collabortive development effort.

migrating the wiki

it could be worth moving this wiki to http://wiki.debian.org

ease upstream pushing
out of direct experience, pushing debian specific patches of vim upstream is far from being easy ATM. We should study how to improve it, this may include several aspects, like:
  1. tracking unresponsive vim runtime files maintainer (this could interest Bram as well)
  2. take over maintainance of vim runtime files which appear to be no longer maintained (e.g. all for which no answer to the pushing requests have been received)
  3. write some tools which ease forwarding of patches to upstream maintainers
vim-tiny in base
it has been discussed on debian-devel and approved, but vim-tiny is still not part of the base system ...

Attending

DDs who plan to be at the Debcamp to work on the above topics: