Re: unable to build vim with gui

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 5:30 PM, Charles E Campbell
<drchip@campbellfamily.biz> wrote:
> Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 3:03 PM, Lucien Gentis <lucien.gentis@waika9.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Maybe you already tried it, but did you try to use "gvim" command instead
>>> of
>>> "vim" command ?
>>
>> Mon cher Lucien: on Unix-like systems, and among others on every
>> system where gvim can use GTK2 (as Dr. Chip's and mine do) a single
>> executable, usually named "vim", will run as a GUI if invoked either
>> as one of "gvim" "gview" "gvimdiff" etc. by means of a symlink, or
>> with the -g command-line switch. It is only on Windows (and, once upon
>> a time, on MS-DOS and possibly on Mac OS 9 and earlier) that a Vim
>> executable can be either a GUI or a console utility but not both.
>>
>>
> Hello, Tony, Lucien, and vimmers:
>
> Thank you for your help! I finally found the culprit, but first:
>
> * Lucien: I use ./vim -g when in the source directory. There's no gvim
> link there; to use such a link, either I'd have to generate it by hand or
> install the (IMHO) defective vim which lacked gui capability -- and I don't
> want a defective vim installed atop an older albeit functioning vim/gvim.
> * Tony: unfortunately I'd forgotten about config.log but it wasn't
> particularly helpful on this one. I ended up putting over 60 comments into
> the vim/src/auto/configure script to track down where the issue was.
>
> I also tried --enable-gui=auto and that, too, did not work.
>
> Well, this is a new Scientific Linux system (and a new computer, too,
> actually) -- so it turns out that my configure commands "--enable-gui=gtk2"
> or "--enable-gui=auto" didn't work. Turns out that I needed
> --enable-gui=gtk3 -- and now I have a functioning gvim!
>
> So, is this perhaps a bug report? ie. --enable-gui=auto should have
> worked, I think.
>
> Regards,
>
> Chip Campbell

It should have worked *if* you had had all GDK2 and GTK2 libraries
*and headers* installed (GDK is required by GTK, and often regarded as
part of it, but some distros package it separately). On my (openSUSE)
Linux, if I want (and I do) to be able to compile gvim for GTK2 I need
to have the gtk2-devel package (which has the C headers needed to
*compile* GTK2 programs), and all its requirements, installed *in
addition* to the GDK and GTK library packages needed to *run* those
same programs.

So IIUC it is not a bug in Vim. Configure will never obey a directive
for which some requirement is not installed, or even just not found
where it looks for it. It might or might not be a bug in Scientific
Linux, or in the workflow of whoever installed the software on the
machine.

Best regards,
Tony.

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