new versions of vim don't come with 'tags' helpfile

[kevinushey]

Newer versions of Vim built through Homebrew don't seem to come with a help tags file -- this means that attempting to execute :help after installing vim returns the somewhat nebulous error:

:help
E433: No tags file
E149: Sorry, no help for help.txt

This can be resolved by manually building the tags file, e.g.

:helptags $VIMRUNTIME/doc

but it would be nice if the homebrew formula built these (e.g. as a post-install step). A simple way to accomplish this seems to be with e.g.

vim --cmd 'helptags $VIMRUNTIME/doc' --cmd 'qall'

although I wonder why the tags file is not generated as part of the regular installation step anymore.

[chdiza]

Building Vim from head outside of Homebrew doesn't exhibit this. Also, I can see by inspecting the tarball that the tags file is present prior to compilation. If I build from the upstream tarball, but not using Homebrew, I don't see the problem.

[chdiza]

I can, however, reproduce by brewing Vim in homebrew.

Inspection of the logs reveals that the tags file installation step is borked in Homebrew:

cp -r ../runtime/pack/* /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1830/share/vim/vim74/pack
/bin/sh ./installman.sh xxd /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1830/share/man/it/man1 "-it" /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1830/share/vim /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1830/share/vim/vim74 /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1830/share/vim ../runtime/doc 644 vim vimdiff evim
/usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1830/bin/vim -u NONE -esX -c "helptags ++t ." -c quit
creating /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1830/share/man/it/man1
make[2]: *** [vimtags] Killed: 9
make[1]: [installrtbase] Error 2 (ignored)

I have no idea why.

[kevinushey]

I'm pretty far out of my element, but I wonder if there's some bad interaction with how homebrew handles stdin/stdout, and non-interactive calling of Vim from ruby?

I tried adding my own call to vim to build the helptags, e.g. in the Homebrew recipe:

system "#{prefix}/bin/vim", "--cmd", 'helptags $VIMRUNTIME/doc'", "--cmd", "quit"

but this just hangs as well.

[chdiza]

Perhaps it's a sandbox thing.

Vim has messed around with the code for generating and installing helptags files recently, like in the last month I'd say.

[DomT4]

Perhaps it's a sandbox thing.

Shouldn't be. Install steps are allowed to do whatever they like to inside their own prefix.

[DomT4]

I can no longer reproduce this. Can anyone else?

[kevinushey]

This still reproduces for me, unfortunately. I installed vim with:

$ brew install vim --verbose --with-client-server --with-lua --with-luajit --with-tcl

I see in the logs:

/usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1864_1/bin/vim -u NONE -esX -c "helptags ++t ." -c quit
/bin/sh: /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1864_1/bin/vim: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [vimtags] Error 127
make[1]: [installrtbase] Error 2 (ignored)

Which is pretty bizarre (and seems different from the error reported by @chdiza). I even see earlier in the logs:

cp vim /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.1864_1/bin

Which I assume implies vim should be available in the directory it's looking at. Unless someone else can reproduce this, it may just be a local issue?

[kevinushey]

Since nobody else has chimed in, I'm going to close this (I assume that if this were a problem a lot more people would have been affected by this).

If anyone else bumps into this, you can just add this snippet to your .vimrc to automagically generate the helptags file as needed:

" Ensure that helptags are generated for the vim help directory
let g:DocPath = expand("$VIMRUNTIME/doc")
let g:DocTags = join([g:DocPath, "tags"], "/")
if !filereadable(g:DocTags)
    execute join(["helptags", g:DocPath])
endif