Building vim from source with Anaconda

Background

I successfully installed Black, the Python code autoformatter, and found that a requirement for it to work inside vim (which is a nice feature of vim-go) is that your installation of vim must be compiled with Python 3.6 or later.

• The error message received was a failure to build an f-string (which was of course introduced in 3.6):

  Error detected while processing /home/louis/.vim/vimplug/black/plugin/black.vim: 
  line  135:
    File "<string>", line 24
      return venv_path / 'lib' / f'python{pyver[0]}.{pyver[1]}' / 'site-packages'
                                                              ^
  SyntaxError: invalid syntax
  

Attempted to install Python 3-built vim via APT package repository

I was nervous about messing up my vim installation, so first of all I backed up my ~/.vim/ directory to my dotfiles repo in case an installation somehow managed to wipe them (for the record it didn't, but better to be safe than sorry).

My first approach was to upgrade the standard vim, but at the time of writing this did not include Python 3 support.

sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade vim
vim --version

Next, I read that there was a version called vim-nox, which is described in the version info as "Huge version without GUI.", i.e. it's built with most of the possible features, most importantly of which are:

+python/dyn
+python3/dyn

i.e. it's built with both Python 2 and Python 3 supported (but apparently you can't run both in the same vim session, if you for some reason wanted to).

Importantly however (at the time of writing) this package does not seem to have been built with a version of Python later than 3.5, so it can't support Black. Oddly, the build info given doesn't give any idea of what version of Python it was built with:

Compilation: gcc -c -I. -Iproto -DHAVE_CONFIG_H     -Wall -Wextra -g -O2 -fPIE -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fstack-protector-all -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=1       
Linking: gcc   -L. -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -L/build/buildd/ruby1.9.1-1.9.3.484/debian/lib -rdynamic -Wl,-export-dynamic -Wl,-E  -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -fPIE -pie -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -Wl,-z,nodlopen -Wl,-z,nodump -Wl,-z,noexecstack -Wl,-z,noexecheap -Wl,--as-needed -o vim        -lm -ltinfo -lnsl  -lselinux   -lacl -lattr -lgpm -ldl   -Wl,-E  -fstack-protector -L/usr/local/lib  -L/usr/lib/perl/5.18/CORE -lperl -ldl -lm -lpthread -lcrypt

Unlike the info given in this issue on the Black bug tracker, which [on the last line] shows it was built from /usr/lib/python3.5/:

Compilation: gcc -c -I. -Iproto -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -Wdate-time -g -O2 -fPIE -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=1
Linking: gcc -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -fPIE -pie -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -Wl,--as-needed -o vim -lm -ltinfo -lnsl -lselinux -lacl -lattr -lgpm -ldl -L/usr/lib/python3.5/config-3.5m-x86_64-linux-gnu -lpython3.5m -lpthread -ldl -lutil -lm

Attempted to upgrade system Python to build vim via the Deadsnakes PPA

Since it didn't seem possible to do this 'the easy way' (i.e. the safest way) through the standard APT package listings, I tried to get versions of Python from the Deadsnakes PPA (as recommended on various Q&A pages, e.g. here):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.6
sudo apt-get install python3.7

However there was no config directory underneath /usr/lib/python3.6 / /usr/lib/python3.7.

For comparison, my system Python 2.7 installation has a config directory at /usr/lib/python2.7/config-x86_64-linux-gnu/

I was following the guide here on building vim from source, and it does mention to "pay attention here check directory correct" when passing a value to the configure script with the --with-python-config-dir flag, so I looked at all files in the /usr/lib directory but neither the 3.6/3.7 versions had a config directory as far as I could tell.

I'm not going to reinstall it to check*, but now I think about it, there may have been python3.6-config and python3.7-config programs installed into /usr/lib which I could have used to provide the location of the config directories, but I didn't see them (though having said that, I didn't attempt to install them from the Deadsnakes PPA either).

• * simply because apt-get purge didn't remove these /usr/lib/python3.* directories when it 'uninstalled' the packages, so I was uncomfortable about reinstalling something that didn't uninstall cleanly.

Attempted to build vim with Anaconda

Lastly, I am now trying to build from Anaconda, which is the source of python on my system PATH.

See:

• Vim installation and Anaconda

  ./configure --with-features=huge --enable-pythoninterp=dynamic --enable-python3interp=dynamic
  

• ...and compare to: Building Vim from source (mentioned earlier), which notably also specifies this flag:

  --with-python3-config-dir=/usr/lib/python3.5/config