From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows; U; AIIEEEE!; Win98; Windows 98; en-US; Gecko masquerading as IE; should it matter?; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050217 Description of problem: Because vim help files are compressed, and because minimal vim cannot understand advance settings in /etc/vimrc which might otherwise help (eg autocmd), when viewing help with /bin/vi all you get is compressed garbage on the screen. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): vim-minimal-6.3.086-0.fc4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1./bin/vi 2.:help index 3. Actual Results: 1. normal vi startup 2. indigestible garbage on screen Expected Results: Should see a help screen Additional info: To manually fix: cd /usr/share/vim/vim63/doc gunzip *.txt.gz vim :helptags /usr/share/vim/vim63/doc :q
Workaround: Use vim instead. You need to install vim-enhanced or something anyway to be able to see help, because vim-minimal doesn't come with any help (or if it does, it doesn't know where to find it).
Thanks Robin, but didn't you read the manual fix I supplied? That actually fixes it so there is no need for your workaround (of using vim instead). Also, vim-enhanced is already installed - that is where the help files come from of course. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to "gunzip *.tzt.gz" as described above. Anyhow, with the vim help files amount to a whopping 4.5MB uncompressed there isn't much point compressing them in the first place.
The text in the help files doesn't apply to vim-minimal in most cases, it describes features of vim-enhanced.
(In reply to comment #3) > The text in the help files doesn't apply to vim-minimal in most cases, it > describes features of vim-enhanced. Obviously - otherwise vim-minimal wouldn't have minimal in its name! It would be reasonable to assume that since vim-minimal is a subset of vim then the corresponding help content applicable to vim-minimal would also be a subset of the total help content. Please, god, help me get out of this dark world of help-desk absurdity!
It goes without saying, of course, that if vim-minimal wasn't supposed to have working help then that feature would have been removed from vim-minimal along with all the other features that have been removed. But yes, vim-minimal does have a help command, so one can reasonable assume that the help is supposed to work properly. And the help command clearly does not work properly when the help files are compressed. I have already supplied a clear fix for the bug (but the better fix would probably be in vim.spec). But it has fallen on deaf ears. All I get is a lame attempt to close this bug report on the basis that some of the help content doesn't apply to vim-minimal. Shame. Pathetic. Disappointing. It is weird, isn't it? This is exactly the attitude which made me ditch SCO Unix many years ago.
This report targets the FC3 or FC4 products, which have now been EOL'd. Could you please check that it still applies to a current Fedora release, and either update the target product or close it ? Thanks.
still applies
Fedora Core 4 is now completely unmaintained. These bugs can't be fixed in that version. If the issue still persists in current Fedora Core, please reopen. Thank you, and sorry about this.
Applicable to Fedora Core 6. Sorry about that.
This bug is still there on Fedora 7.