How-To: Debianize vim 8 and install it from source

[Fi8sVrs]

 

 

So, fellow insane penguins, after 10 years we get a new vim release, specifically 8.0. It is the first major version after all these years and we have alot of goodies and features packed up. As vim is considered one of the best terminal based text editors in linux, i am sure alot of people will be hapy to get their hands on it.
But enough with the chit-chat and let’s see what new features vim 8 brings with it:

– Asynchronous I/O support, channels, JSON
– Jobs
– Timers
– Partials, Lambdas and Closures
– Packages
– New style testing
– Viminfo merged by timestamp
– GTK+ 3 support
– MS-Windows DirectX support

If oyu would like to see all the changes and new fetaures added you can check the CHANGELOG.

Anyhow, the purpose of this article is to describe the fastest way to make a .deb package from vim8 sources and have it installed on your Debian. I’m using Debian 8.5 (Jessie) so if you are trying to doit on a different system make sure you know what you are doing.

First, we need to install the pre-requisites. We need checkinstall in order to build the .deb packages and the ncurses libraries (i chose ncurses but you can use any other terminal handling libraries)

 

 

root@debian:/usr/src# apt-get install checkinstall libncurses5-dev

Now we need to clone the vim git repository so we switch to ‘/usr/src’ and clone it there, then we switch the working directory to ‘vim’
 

root@debian:~# cd /usr/src

root@debian:/usr/src# git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git

root@debian:/usr/src# cd vim

While in the ‘vim’ directory, we first need to configure it, so it detects the system and see if we miss anything. If there’s anything missing the ‘./configure script will spit out a nice error that will tell you what is missing. On my end i had everything installed. Usually checkinstall should install it’s dependencies when you install it. But, back to the scope of this article.

 

root@debian:/usr/src/vim# ./configure

After ‘./configure’ script is done you will simply need to issue the ‘checkinstall’ command. Here you will be presented with 13 options that you can edit as it follows:

 

root@debian:/usr/src/vim# checkinstall
 
checkinstall 1.6.2, Copyright 2009 Felipe Eduardo Sanchez Diaz Duran
           This software is released under the GNU GPL.
 
 
 
*****************************************
**** Debian package creation selected ***
*****************************************
 
This package will be built according to these values:
 
0 -  Maintainer: [ root@debian ]
1 -  Summary: [  ]
2 -  Name:    [ vim ]
3 -  Version: [ 20160914 ]
4 -  Release: [ 1 ]
5 -  License: [ GPL ]
6 -  Group:   [ checkinstall ]
7 -  Architecture: [ amd64 ]
8 -  Source location: [ vim ]
9 -  Alternate source location: [  ]
10 - Requires: [  ]
11 - Provides: [ vim ]
12 - Conflicts: [  ]
13 - Replaces: [  ]

 

Feel free to edit each of these options as you may see fit. Upon successful completion, ‘checkinstall’ will generate the .deb package and also install it automatically.

 

**********************************************************************
 
 Done. The new package has been installed and saved to
 
 /usr/src/vim/vim_8.0.3-20160914-1_amd64.deb
 
 You can remove it from your system anytime using:
 
      dpkg -r vim
 
**********************************************************************

 

Source: http://insanepengu.in