Messing MacVim

By Douglas Drumond

March 6, 2015

I published a new version of MacVim on last week Monday and was quite happy with it. It was early morning, I published it at 7:30 AM (UTC-3) and went to work. Of course, being an avid user of Vim, the first thing I did at work was updating my copy of MacVim.

Then things went awry. MacVim crashed at launch (of course, it didn’t occur at home). E-mails started popping on my inbox. Starting without a .vimrc was fine, so it was a problem with plugins. Probably I had compiled it against wrong version of Ruby (I use RVM and install several Ruby versions, but MacVim must be compiled against system Ruby), but I was quite sure I had issued a rvm use system before. When I came back home, I tried to investigate a little further and, as I suspected, it was Ruby (it crashed when I used Command-T plugin). But how? Well, I was so tired that I went to bed and decided to look at the issue later.

At Movile, my project is on a tight deadline, so, every time I got home, I was so tired that I couldn’t focus. I tried, but postponed looking at the issue (also, sometimes I tried but hit a dead end). Until, finally, last weekend I decided to solve this matter. But first, my Mac was so slow and with a lot of garbage installed that, instead of deleting each app and some files, I backed up what was important and did something I was used to when I was a Windows user: formatting the computer and reinstalling the OS.

With a new OS, lots of disk space (even after installing some apps, I went from 10 GB free to 80 GB), it was time to fix MacVim. I recompiled and ran it to collect logs and, guess what? It worked flawlessly, even with Command-T. I hadn’t installed RVM (still haven’t) and MacVim used system Ruby (some day earlier, I made sure I was compiling after rvm use system, but it didn’t work, it just got me some logs in Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports). I uploaded the build, marked as pre-release and went to work. MacVim worked flawlessly again, even on my work machine. People who complained about the bug sent me feedback telling that everything was fine now.

So, even setting RVM to use system Ruby, MacVim was compiled against the wrong version of Ruby.

Lesson learned: be careful and doubt everything. I sincerely apologize for being careless in my first release. I felt the pain as a user too, I upgraded and downgraded (as other users had to) because of my own carelessness.

Another lesson learned: MacVim community is awesome.