How to compile Vim on Debian

True crafters build their own tools. Well actually I'm not so sure but in software world, you can do it quite easily. So I decided to pull Vim sources from Github and compile it on Debian. And, it was not as easy as I thought.

I won't write a long post about that, here is what I did to compile it with python and X11 clipboard support:

$ sudo apt install libx11-dev libxtst-dev libxt-dev libsm-dev libxpm-dev

$ LDFLAGS="-rdynamic" ./configure  --with-x  --enable-python3interp=yes \
--enable-rubyinterp=yes --prefix=/usr --with-features=huge
$ make

Remarks:

  • My Debian is 11.2.
  • I could have used sudo apt build-dep vim-nox but it wanted to install a lot of unneeded stuff.
  • I have a Python version installed from source, so I did not apt install -dev package
  • It seems that -rdynamic flag is needed in order to use python interpreter. It's not obvious at all

Hooray, I have my own Vim and now a trace of what I did for this great achievement in my developer's life (not)!

Posted on 2022-02-20 at 00:07

Tags: tooling

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