Hi all,

In June 2001 I released a free software project called VimOutliner [1].
By September 2003 my itch was scratched and I handed over official
maintainership to Noel Henson, who had made VimOutliner (VO for short)
into something better than I'd ever dreamed of. Noel served as
maintainer til the beginning of 2010. I think by that time his itch was
pretty much scratched too.

Meanwhile, over the '00s, lots of people with the ability to code and
desires for more features joined the project. I don't think the project
had one single maintainer during the '10s, people drifted in and out
and maintained. There was quite a bit of talk of adding more features,
but it never happened, which is good because VimOutliner had reached the
stage where it did what was needed to do, and adding features would have
caused complication.

Throughout the '10s I just kept using VimOutliner: It kept working.
Then the latest crew, whom I don't know, with no discussion on the
mailing list, changed the prefix key combo from ,, to \

The ,, key combo had been chosen by research by me as the fastest and
most practical, and had been vigorously affirmed as the best for
quickly downloading your mind to a file. The Debian maintainer kept
switching the ,, to \ but that was no biggie: We didn't care what
Debian did. Now, however, the Debian way has invaded the upstream.

Yesterday, I installed Devuan Jessie in a Qemu guest and installed the
vim-vimoutliner package. VimOutliner didn't work, and a half hour
investigation didn't help. This didn't surprise me: When I was still one
of the main devs for VimOutliner, people had problems with the Debian
package constantly, and we helped them by telling them to de-install,
and then install from our upstream tarball. Which worked. How Debian
can release packages that stone don't work is beyond me. I spoze it's
theoretically possible that it would work on Debian, but I don't have
the time to investigate that.

Long term, I don't know whether I'm going to fork VimOutliner or not.
But short term, I'll be providing the tarball for VO 0.36, the last
version not contaminated by \. And I'll provide instructions on how to
install it from the tarball. Then, if somebody knowing the intricacies
of apt-get can help me, I'll make a Devuan-only package, that actually
runs when installed :-)

If anybody has an interest in outline processor programs and wants to
get a good one (I think the best one) that runs on Devuan, please let me
know.

SteveT

[1] http://troubleshooters.com/projects/vimoutliner/index.htm
[2] http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/200310/200310.htm