Here's how I patched this package to install NeoVim 0.8.0 (at the time of this writing, the PKGBUILD is out-of-date)

diff --git a/PKGBUILD b/PKGBUILD
index 316bd6c..5eeb1a6 100644
--- a/PKGBUILD
+++ b/PKGBUILD
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
 # Contributor: Florian Hahn <flo@fhahn.com>

 pkgname=neovim-bin
-pkgver=0.7.2
+pkgver=0.8.0
 pkgrel=1
 pkgdesc='Fork of Vim aiming to improve user experience, plugins, and GUIs'
 arch=('amd64')
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ source=(
         "vimdiff")
 postinst="${pkgname}.postinst"
 prerm="${pkgname}.prerm"
-sha256sums=('fa75852890ca4b57551da194c696d3bbd14d9d2e966bc188d1e7e52ee942b71d'
+sha256sums=('1af27471f76f1b4f7ad6563c863a4a78117f0515e3390ee4d911132970517fa7'
             '5d3178628afc39f0318638cad19e9ad06ada89926dfb263e93ab35cc8f60e911'
             '3cb963a264b6cf45749627408b5a62c6945e5e426b595bb5e6a388194c2c1990'
             '1d3123b9d97a4889696ab72db558041b5cca8e26ff51ae557f7842242a7d4ed1')

The alias system is meant so users can easily swap out their vim command to use nvim instead. You can always go back to using vim as the source for vim by updating your preference with update-alternatives.

No, why did you do that? Don't autoset an alias for vim... If I type vim, I want vim and not neovim. I am so uninstalling this now... Please don't make decisions for other people.

Fixed.

Hi! Just got some more packaging suggestions :)

Would you be able to add a postinst and prerm script to add the installed nvim binary to the update-alternatives list for vi? The neovim package in Ubuntu 20.04's repositories is doing as follows:

postinst:

#!/bin/sh

set -e

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/editor editor /usr/bin/nvim 30 \
                    --slave /usr/share/man/man1/editor.1.gz editor.1.gz \
                            /usr/share/man/man1/nvim.1.gz
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/ex ex /usr/libexec/neovim/ex 30
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/rvim rvim /usr/libexec/neovim/rvim 30
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/rview rview /usr/libexec/neovim/rview 30
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/vi vi /usr/bin/nvim 30
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/vim vim /usr/bin/nvim 30
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/view view /usr/libexec/neovim/view 30
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/vimdiff vimdiff /usr/libexec/neovim/vimdiff 30

exit 0

prerm:

#!/bin/sh

set -e

case "$1" in
  remove|deconfigure)
    update-alternatives --remove editor /usr/bin/nvim
    update-alternatives --remove ex /usr/libexec/neovim/ex
    update-alternatives --remove rvim /usr/libexec/neovim/rvim
    update-alternatives --remove rview /usr/libexec/neovim/rview
    update-alternatives --remove vi /usr/bin/nvim
    update-alternatives --remove vim /usr/bin/nvim
    update-alternatives --remove view /usr/libexec/neovim/view
    update-alternatives --remove vimdiff /usr/libexec/neovim/vimdiff
    ;;

  upgrade|failed-upgrade)
    ;;

  *)
    echo "prerm called with unknown argument '$1'" >&2
    exit 0
    ;;
esac

exit 0

When installing I got this error:

dpkg: error processing archive ./neovim-bin_0.6.0-3_amd64.deb (--install):
 trying to overwrite '/usr/share/man/man1/nvim.1.gz', which is also in package neovim-runtime 0.4.3-3

Could you add neovim-runtime to the conflicts array for the package?

@hwittenborn Thanks for the advice. Fixed.

Hi! I was just looking over your PKGBUILD and noticed a few issues:

• Your prepare() function which extracts the neovim archive shouldn't be needed, as makedeb should be doing that automatically. If you have makedeb installed from the APT repositories it's awaiting PR #69 (you'd notice the issue if libarchive-tools isn't installed), but I wasn't sure if that was from you not knowing that makedeb should be handling that or not.

• Everywhere ${pkgdir} is used should be wrapped around quotes (i.e. "${pkgdir}/usr/bin/").

• If you get to fixing that all, it looks like you added an extra p in some of your echo commands.

Thanks for packaging up Neovim! I think I'll be using it after that's all fixed so I can use some newer features not in Ubuntu 20.04's repository version :)