And a vim mystery

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I am having a hard time figuring out why it is necessary to include Mercurial, gtk2, gpm, libxt, libsm and desktop-file-utils in the construction of vim.

This all comes about because, in the process of stripping the guts out of ConnochaetOS and converting it to a framebuffer speed demon, I realized that vim choked without gtk2.

And libxt, and almost all the rest of that stuff above. And the dependencies, of course.

Mystifying, but I am no expert. I tried to rewrite (with considerable effort) the vim PKGBUILD to omit all that stuff, use the 7.3 tarball, and lose a little weight.

It’s not going very well though. Big, complex applications like this always seem to spin out of control and turn ugly when I write my own PKGBUILDs. I do better with simpler stuff.

I’ve searched AUR for something like a “vim-nogui” or Debian’s vim.tiny, but there are quite a lot to skim through. I’ll keep trying and keep searching. Maybe something has already been done. 😐

8 thoughts on “And a vim mystery

  1. Kaleb Elwert

    You shouldn’t even need to look in the AUR. The Arch ABS has a package for vim (which doesn’t even use X or the X libs) and a package for gvim (which needs gtk+), though both should use the same source package.

    Reply
  2. IsaacG

    Yeah… something’s wrong. What Kaleb said. I’m running vim without GTK or much else.

    http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/vim/
    Depends: gpm, perl, vim-runtime=7.3.138-1

    When I want to make a package lighter, I get the PKGBUILD, run `makepkg -o`, enter the src directory and do: `./configure –help | less` and find what I can –disable to turn off dependencies.

    Reply
  3. Kaleb Elwert

    You could always check out the gentoo ebuilds. They’re really useful when figuring out how to build certain packages.

    Reply
  4. Sara

    You’ll need mercurial if you’re compiling vim from source because that is what vim uses for version control. I think only if you install the package from source all those dependencies are pulled in; otherwise, it’s just vim-runtime, gpm, and perl as others have mentioned.

    Reply
  5. Sara

    gpm definitely can be stripped out, I forgot to mention (had done so myself when I was using vim… but now I’m using plain vi 🙂 ). It’s the “–enable-gpm” option in the default configure line that requires that dependency.

    Reply
  6. Pingback: A note of thanks: vim-stripped « Motho ke motho ka botho

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