As I comment here: http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage-dev/msg_6b96f731695e26d07ddfcbb052438d6e.xml The 80 Character word wrap restriction changes how people write ebuilds, and in some cases, triggers weird unwanted behaviour that if you don't realise it had occurred, could result in broken code. As the 80 Character limit is not apparently part of any sort of ebuild policy[1] ( although it is suggested by the dev manual[2]), it seems strange to have it enforced by the vim syntax file for them. I humbly suggest this 80 character limit be removed entirely ( textwidth=0 ) or pump it up to something more manageable that won't break in the middle of typing the ebuild description field. ( Which, according to repoman, may be as long as 100 characters, leaving the line length at 114 after adding the length of 'DESCRIPTION=""' to it. ) I think a nice big healthy 240 character width seems reasonable for a default, because vim *hardlimits* on that value, so it will give a reasonable amount of edit flexibility, but still have some measure of "sane" to discourage one-lining the whole file. 1: http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage-dev/msg_7f513235d6e80371762c0730ebda28f1.xml 2: http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/file-format/index.html#indenting-and-whitespace
I'd rather not set any default value and rely on people's common sense. When that fails, people with better common sense can slap the people using 200+ char lines. ;)
The default has now been removed from git and will be in the next release coming soon (or emerge the live ebuild).
