Tag Archives: version

Gracefully degrading .vimrc

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If you work on many machines with varying operating systems (Windows, GNU/Linux, MacOS X, BSD) and in various upgrade states, particularly if some of the machines are a lot older or have more minimal or custom installations of Vim, you might not be using your .vimrc file on all of them because it includes features that aren’t available on some other machines, meaning that Vim spits a lot of errors at you on startup.

This might have prompted you to perhaps keep a simpler .vimrc file, a “lesser” .vimrc, that you put onto your remote machines, and you keep the “real” .vimrc on your own machine to include lines that use all of the features only available to you on that machine. If you like to version your configuration files, maintaining and testing both of the .vimrc files on all the machines gets old fast; it would be much better to have a single .vimrc file that simply ignored configuration it didn’t understand. There are several ways to approach this.

Check features

Perhaps the best way to manage this is to group all of your configuration items by Vim feature, and to check for their presence in your .vimrc file before attempting to set any of the relevant options. You can do this with the has() function. As an example, here’s a stanza from my .vimrc:

if has("spell")
    set spelllang=en_nz
    nnoremap <leader>s :set spell!<CR>
endif

I set the spellang option and perform the remapping only if the +spell feature is actually available.

If an option is dependent on a feature having been compiled into Vim, you can usually tell by calling :help on it and looking for a phrase like “not available when compiled without the +xyz feature.” You can also view a list all the features available with :help feature-list, and see which features are compiled into a given vim binary with the --version parameter:

$ vim --version
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.3 (2010 Aug 15, compiled Feb 11 2012 03:54:05) Included patches: 1-429
Modified by pkg-vim-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
Compiled by jamessan@debian.org
Huge version with GTK2 GUI.  Features included (+) or not (-):
+arabic +autocmd +balloon_eval +browse ++builtin_terms +byte_offset +cindent
+clientserver +clipboard +cmdline_compl +cmdline_hist +cmdline_info +comments
+conceal +cryptv +cscope +cursorbind +cursorshape +dialog_con_gui +diff ...

There are certain special features, like +unix, that you can use to check whether the Vim instance running is on a platform suitable for an option or not. I find this is handy for choosing the correct syntax for specifying fonts on Windows:

if has("unix")
    set guifont=Inconsolata\ 14
else
    set guifont=Consolas:h12
endif

Check options

You can check whether an option itself exists rather than a feature with exists():

if exists("&foldenable")
    set foldenable
endif

Check version number

Another way of filtering out options for older versions of Vim is by version number, which you can perform by checking the value of v:version. For example, to only set folding options if you’re working with at least Vim 7, you could do:

if v:version >= 700
    set foldenable
endif

In this particular case, though, it’s a little clearer and more robust to check the condition with if has("folding"), because the version number being recent enough does not necessarily mean the feature exists. However, one good application of using version numbers is fixing bugs or unexpected behaviour in older instances of Vim, to make it behave consistently with newer versions, or even vice-versa if necessary.

Silent calls

If you can’t find a way to filter by feature or version number, a simple way to suppress any error messages from a configuration line is to preface it with silent!. I find this is a nice compact way to call plugin-dependent functions like pathogen#infect(), or custom colorschemes that you can’t be sure actually exist on the machine:

silent! call pathogen#infect()
silent! colorscheme zellner

Try/Catch/If

If you’re not dealing with versions of Vim older than 7.0, another possibility is the try/catch/endtry block. This is handy for setting a default or fallback option if a call fails, such as selecting colorschemes:

try
    colorscheme zenburn
catch
    colorscheme torte
endtry

This is my least-favoured method of making .vimrc files degrade gracefully, as it breaks completely on older instances of Vim.

Thanks to Reddit user bouncingsoul for suggesting the second method which I initially missed.

Unix as IDE: Revisions

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This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Unix as IDE.

Version control is now seen as an indispensable part of professional software development, and GUI IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio have embraced it and included support for industry standard version control systems in their products. Modern version control systems trace their lineage back to Unix concepts from programs such as diff and patch however, and there are plenty of people who will insist that the best way to use a version control system is still at a shell prompt.

In this last article in the Unix as an IDE series, I’ll follow the evolution of common open-source version control systems from the basic concepts of diff and patch, among the very first version control tools.

diff, patch, and RCS

A central concept for version control systems has been that of the unified diff, a file expressing in human and computer readable terms a set of changes made to a file or files. The diff command was first released by Douglas McIlroy in 1974 for the 5th Edition of Unix, so it’s one of the oldest commands still in regular use on modern systems.

A unified diff, the most common and interoperable format, can be generated by comparing two versions of a file with the following syntax:

$ diff -u example.{1,2}.c
--- example.1.c    2012-02-15 20:15:37.000000000 +1300
+++ example.2.c    2012-02-15 20:15:57.000000000 +1300
@@ -1,8 +1,9 @@
 #include <stdio.h>
+#include <stdlib.h> 

 int main (int argc, char* argv[]) { printf("Hello, world!\n");
-    return 0;
+    return EXIT_SUCCESS; }

In this example, the second file has a header file added, and the call to return changed to use the standard EXIT_SUCCESS rather than a literal 0 as the return value for main(). Note that the output for diff also includes metadata such as the filename that was changed and the last modification time of each of the files.

A primitive form of version control for larger code bases was thus for developers to trade diff output, called patches in this context, so that they could be applied to one another’s code bases with the patch tool. We could save the output from diff above as a patch like so:

$ diff -u example.{1,2}.c > example.patch

We could then send this patch to a developer who still had the old version of the file, and they could automatically apply it with:

$ patch example.1.c < example.patch

A patch can include diff output from more than one file, including within subdirectories, so this provides a very workable way to apply changes to a source tree.

The operations involved in using diff output to track changes were sufficiently regular that for keeping in-place history of a file, the Source Code Control System and the Revision Control System that has pretty much replaced it were developed. RCS enabled “locking” files so that they could not be edited by anyone else while “checked out” of the system, paving the way for other concepts in more developed version control systems.

RCS retains the advantage of being very simple to use. To place an existing file under version control, one need only type ci <filename> and provide an appropriate description for the file:

$ ci example.c
example.c,v  <--  example.c
enter description, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
NOTE: This is NOT the log message!
>> example file
>> .
initial revision: 1.1
done

This creates a file in the same directory, example.c,v, that will track the changes. To make changes to the file, you check it out, make the changes, then check it back in:

$ co -l example.c
example.c,v  -->  example.c
revision 1.1 (locked)
done
$ vim example.c
$ ci -u example.c
example.c,v  <--  example.c
new revision: 1.2; previous revision: 1.1
enter log message, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
>> added a line
>> .
done

You can then view the history of a project with rlog:

$ rlog example.c

RCS file: example.c,v
Working file: example.c
head: 1.2
branch:
locks: strict
access list:
symbolic names:
keyword substitution: kv
total revisions: 2; selected revisions: 2
description:
example file
----------------------------
revision 1.2
date: 2012/02/15 07:39:16;  author: tom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -0
added a line
----------------------------
revision 1.1
date: 2012/02/15 07:36:23;  author: tom;  state: Exp;
Initial revision
=============================================================================

And get a patch in unified diff format between two revisions with rcsdiff -u:

$ rcsdiff -u -r1.1 -r1.2 ./example.c 
===================================================================
RCS file: ./example.c,v
retrieving revision 1.1
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -u -r1.1 -r1.2
--- ./example.c 2012/02/15 07:36:23 1.1
+++ ./example.c 2012/02/15 07:39:16 1.2
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
 int main (int argc, char* argv[])
 {
     printf("Hello, world!\n");
+    printf("Extra line!\n");
     return EXIT_SUCCESS;
 }

It would be misleading to imply that simple patches were now in disuse as a method of version control; they are still very commonly used in the forms above, and also figure prominently in both centralised and decentralised version control systems.

CVS and Subversion

To handle the problem of resolving changes made to a code base by multiple developers, centralized version systems were developed, with the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) developed first and the slightly more advanced Subversion later on. The central feature of these systems are using a central server that contains the repository, from which authoritative versions of the codebase at any particular time or revision can be retrieved. These are termed working copies of the code.

For these systems, the basic unit of the systems remained the changeset, and the most common way to represent these to the user was in the archetypal diff format used in earlier systems. Both systems work by keeping records of these changesets, rather than the actual files themselves from state to state.

Other concepts introduced by this generation of systems were of branching projects so that separate instances of the same project could be worked on concurrently, and then merged into the mainline, or trunk with appropriate testing and review. Similarly, the concept of tagging was introduced to flag certain revisions as representing the state of a codebase at the time of a release of the software. The concept of the merge was also introduced; reconciling conflicting changes made to a file manually.

Git and Mercurial

The next generation of version control systems are distributed or decentralized systems, in which working copies of the code themselves contain a complete history of the project, and are hence not reliant on a central server to contribute to the project. In the open source, Unix-friendly environment, the standout systems are Git and Mercurial, with their client programs git and hg.

For both of these systems, the concept of communicating changesets is done with the operations push, pull and merge; changes from one repository are accepted by another. This decentralized system allows for a very complex but tightly controlled ecosystem of development; Git was originally developed by Linus Torvalds to provide an open-source DVCS capable of managing development for the Linux kernel.

Both Git and Mercurial differ from CVS and Subversion in that the basic unit for their operations is not changesets, but complete files (blobs) saved using compression. This makes finding the log history of a single file or the differences between two revisions of a file slightly more expensive, but the output of git log --patch still retains the familiar unified diff output for each revision, some forty years after diff was first being used:

commit c1e5559ddb09f8d02b989596b0f4100ad1aab422
Author: Tom Ryder <tom@sanctum.geek.nz>
Date:   Thu Feb 2 01:14:21 2012

Changed my mind about this one.

diff --git a/vim/vimrc b/vim/vimrc index cfbe8e0..65a3143 100644
--- a/vim/vimrc
+++ b/vim/vimrc
@@ -47,10 +47,6 @@
 set shiftwidth=4
 set softtabstop=4
 set tabstop=4

-" Heresy
-inoremap <C-a> <Home>
-inoremap <C-e> <End>
-
 " History
 set history=1000

The two systems have considerable overlap in functionality and even in command set, and the question of which to use provokes considerable debate. The best introductions I’ve seen to each are Pro Git by Scott Chacon, and Hg Init by Joel Spolsky.

Conclusion

This is the last post in the Unix as IDE series; I’ve tried to offer a rapid survey of the basic tools available just within a shell on GNU/Linux for all of the basic functionality afforded by professional IDEs. At points I’ve had to be not quite as thorough as I’d like in explaining certain features, but to those unfamiliar to development on GNU/Linux machines this will all have hopefully given some idea of how comprehensive a development environment the humble shell can be, and all with free, highly mature, and standard software tools.