Compile vim7.4 source code with python support failed

Question

I have download the source code of vim7.4 and decide to upgrade the vim to 7.4. However, I can not add python support to it:

./configure  --enable-pythoninterp  --enable-rubyinterp --enable-gui=no --without-x --enable-cscope --enable-multibyte --prefix=/usr

While checking src/auto/config.log, I found:

configure:5592: checking Python's configuration directory
configure:5614: result:·
configure:5620: result: can't find it!

Installed python info:

dpkg-query -l python
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                             Version                          Description
+++-================================-================================-   ================================================================================
ii  python                           2.7.3-0ubuntu2.2                 interactive high-level object-oriented language (default version)

After invoking make in the src dir:

./vim --version | grep python
+cryptv          +linebreak       -python          +viminfo
+cscope          +lispindent      -python3         +vreplace

It seems that it's caused by vim unable to locate the config dir for python. How to fix it?

Thanks for your insights in advance.

Answer 1

Make sure you have the python development packages installed (python-devel or python-dev I think). You can specify the python config directory by passing, to ./configure, something like:

--with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib64/python2.7/config

To find the config directory (you may need to do updatedb first):

locate python | grep '/config$'

Answer 2

From your error messages you don't have python-dev installed

sudo apt-get install python-dev

this should fix your problem

Answer 3

Make sure you have installed the development packages for python and point towards the appropriate config directory.

ex: ./configure --enable-pythoninterp --with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.7/config