Bug 118128 – Can't emerge VIM due to perl in USE= field

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED NEEDINFO

[Description Kris Westlund 2006-01-06 19:21:46 UTC]

I have spent more than a full day Googling to try and find out why my Gentoo installation would not allow me to emerge vim.  I have tried many things and can only hope that my efforts did not mess something else up.  I am a noob here and my determination to learn is what keeps me interested in Gentoo.  I just wasn't expecting to have to find such an obscure website to lead me to the way to fix the problem.

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:e-bmvio4I2EJ:eric.extremeboredom.net/2005/04/16/198/+anyone+having+vim+emerge+problems&hl=en

This site finally told me that having perl in the USE= field of the /etc/make.conf can cause vim to not compile through an "emerge vim" command.  The only reason I knew that perl was even in my USE= field of the /etc/make.conf was in the endless hours of research since it is a default for Gentoo and not an explicit addition since I wrote the make.conf file from scratch using the Bob P's Stage 1/3 installation instructions.

To fix the problem I had to manually edit the /etc/make.conf file and add -perl in the USE="nptl" line so that it became USE="nptl -perl".  I hope this can help any other out there that are having similar problems.  There were no error messages in the compiling of vim, it just stopped dead after some lines describing python or perl commands.

With so much good documentation out there for Gentoo it was disturbing to find it took this long to fix such a small, yet for this noob complicated, problem as I do not yet understand how perl threading is involved in this error.  I do feel that this experience is beneficial for my understanding of linux, and I hope that I get responses to this post that will help me to understand more. 

To set the record straight for all who might read this post, when I say noob I mean to Linux not just to Gentoo.  I had some very basic understanding when I began this project.

Thanks to Bob P for laying out instructions that even a noob could follow and benefit from, and thanks to Eric's Blog for having the commentary that led me to overcome the problem.

[Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-01-06 19:54:37 UTC]

Post some error messages, vim version and emerge --info output and reopen then.