Hi Matthew,
you don’t have comments in your blog, so I feel the urge to reply to your post this way.
I recently took over the vim-vimoutliner package, unfortunately too late to fix it for Lenny.
> However, the Debian vimoutliner package (in combination with the awesomely undocumented
> vim-addons mess) is an absolute pain to get going, requiring far more swearing and prodding
> than seems necessary. Since I don’t do it often enough, too, I keep forgetting how, and today
> things came to an absolute head when I very nearly flung my netbook across the room as it
> singularly refused to do my outliner bidding.
I think the situation of the plugin in Debian has improved. It still needs vim-addons to be enabled, but that is because it is simply better to have an opt-in/opt-out system for each user on a system instead of simply enabling it systemwide. I don’t think that calling vim-addons ‚awesomly undocumented‘, because the manpage is quiet good with respect to the use case of the application. What really is wrong about the Lenny package (except some technical flaws, like modifying the upstream tarball and not documenting it) is the fact, that it misses the documentation for using vim-addons. That has changed in the squeeze version and shouldn’t be a problem there.
Indeed in the current package, there is eventually one piece of documentation missing (which I got alread y prodded about by a user):
> $ echo "filetype plugin indent on" >> ~/.vimrc<br /><br />Yes, it is required to enable file type detection, in order to get a file type detection plugin,<br />like vim-outliner partially is, to run. That is no brainer (for vim users) but sure it should be<br />documented. But then again: It should already be: In the help file of the upstream package.<br />