dwm@fibercom.COM (David W. Minnich) (07/19/90)
We recently got a Sun 4/330 at our site, and I've been noticing some strange behavior in vi. In my .exrc I set the modeline option to vi. This allows me to set file-specific defaults in vi by including a modeline at the bottom of the file. On our other systems this works fine. On the 4/330, if a modeline is present in the file, then vi always thinks I've modified the file whether I have or not. (e.g. if I type "vi <filename>" followed immediately by ":q", vi complains about "No write since last change"). The contents of the modeline command appear to make no difference; everything I tried behaved the same way. We are running SunOS 4.1 on this machine. Does anyone know what's going on, and how to fix it? As always, email to me and I'll summarize if warranted. -- David W. Minnich INTERNET: dwm@fibercom.com FiberCom, Inc. UUCP: ...!uunet!fibercom!dwm P.O. Box 11966 PHONE: (703) 342-6700, (800) 423-1183 ext. 347 Roanoke, VA 24022-1966 FAX: (703) 342-5961
gert@fwi.uva.nl (Gert Poletiek) (07/20/90)
dwm@fibercom.COM (David W. Minnich) writes: >We recently got a Sun 4/330 at our site, and I've been noticing some strange >behavior in vi. In my .exrc I set the modeline option to vi. This allows >me to set file-specific defaults in vi by including a modeline at the bottom >of the file. On our other systems this works fine. On the 4/330, if a >modeline is present in the file, then vi always thinks I've modified the file >whether I have or not. (e.g. if I type "vi <filename>" followed immediately >by ":q", vi complains about "No write since last change"). The contents of the >modeline command appear to make no difference; everything I tried behaved the >same way. We are running SunOS 4.1 on this machine. Does anyone know what's >going on, and how to fix it? >As always, email to me and I'll summarize if warranted. >-- You're running SunOS 4.1 which is becoming more and more System V comaptible. One of the things that are changed is that vi now comes from the SVR4 distribution and not from de BSD part of SunOS. SVR4 vi does not know the modeline feature. You're out of luck...or get the BSD sources and compile them for the sun. Gert Poletiek Dept. of Math. and Computing Science, University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 409, NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands Internet: gert@fwi.uva.nl uucp: gert@uva.uucp bitnet: gert%fwi.uva.nl@mcvax.bitnet -- Gert Poletiek Dept. of Math. and Computing Science, University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 409, NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands Internet: gert@fwi.uva.nl uucp: gert@uva.uucp bitnet: gert%fwi.uva.nl@mcvax.bitnet
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (07/22/90)
>You're running SunOS 4.1 which is becoming more and more System V comaptible. True. >One of the things that are changed is that vi now comes from the SVR4 >distribution False. It comes from S5R3.1, not S5R4. This was, BTW, mainly done to get support of 8-bit character sets, not for S5 compatibility. > SVR4 vi does not know the modeline feature. I don't have the S5R4 source handy, but the S5R3.1 one, while it doesn't know the "modeline" feature, does know the "modelines" feature. :-) In other words, both Berkeley and AT&T realized that always interpreting modelines was extremely stupid, and changed their "vi"s to 1) not interpret modelines by default and 2) to have an option you had to turn on in order to have them interpret modelines. (Earlier versions of both the BSD and S5 "vi"s did understand modelines - whether you wanted them to or not!) Unfortunately, they chose different names for that option.... For SunOS 4.1, we changed the S5R3.1 "vi" to use "modeline" for BSD compatibility, rather than "modelines". The problem he's having is probably a bug somewhere. (I don't know whether he's running 4.1 on the other machines; if so, the problem probably has nothing to do with the fact that it's a 4/330 and everything to do with the fact that it's running 4.1.)