Hello, people.

Now, I need to use a computer with linux that does NOT have a decent Vim version to use, and this breaks my frequent uses of it, in these machines. For people who know vim well enough, I cannot use copy/paste register running vim in terminal, and this is one thing I do frequently - among other things "too advanced" to put in this "basic" version that is in this stupid Ubuntu of a Computer Science laboratory. I would not care, since I find it simple to download the package I wanted, and run it from my user folder, from the tmp folder, or any other arbitrary folder that can hold this "huge" software and everything it uses.

But what I can download demands libraries **newer** than this computer has, like libperl.so.5.28! For the second time, I would not care, since I can download a source package and compile it to be installed in an arbitrary folder. But this step is strange, today, and it is the reason for starting this thread.

First, I got the oldest package I can find in Debian site:

packages.debian.org/buster/vim-gtk

I do want to use vim with GUI, but it seems that I use vim-gtk when I use the "+ register (copy/paste for graphical programs), for example. Fine. In the above page, I choose the amd64 link, in the table almost in the end of the above page, which is:

security.debian.org/debian-security/pool/updates/main/v/vim/vim-gtk3_8.1.0875-5+deb10u6_amd64.deb

Is it correct that, in the last URL, the name "buster" is not present? Supposing it is correct like this, I extracting this package with the command

dpkg-deb -x [package file] .

does not work, since the mentioned library file does not exist in this machine:

$ ./usr/bin/vim.gtk3
./usr/bin/vim.gtk3: error while loading shared libraries: libperl.so.5.28: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

$

So, back to vim-gtk buster page, I download its source there, which is in URL:

security.debian.org/debian-security/pool/updates/main/v/vim/vim_8.1.0875-5+deb10u6.debian.tar.xz

Again, I find it strange that "buster" is not written in this URL. And "gtk3" neither. Anyway, I extract it, and when I open README.source file inside it, and it says to me:

If you are reading this from a Debian source package, you can stop now;
this package should build normally after extracting with dpkg-source -x.
The rest of this file gives some hints about generating source packages
from the packaging git repository.

There is no file named configure in the source file! So, I cannot do the usual

./configure [any option I want to change default]; make; make install

So, I deleted everything that I extracted before, and ran

dpkg-source -x [tar.xz source file]

and it did not work! The output is:

$ dpkg-source -x ~/tmp/vim-gtk3_8.1.0875-5+deb10u6_amd64.deb
dpkg-source: error: syntax error in /home/grad/ccomp/11/avic/tmp/vim-gtk3_8.1.0875-5+deb10u6_amd64.deb at line 2: line with unknown format (not field-colon-value)

$

So, what am I doing wrong? Or, if there is something wrong in what I did, or in what I read to do, how should I do things today?

Thank you in advance.

do you want to build gvim? You need to read the guide, it is quite simple.
as an example: https://medium.com/@rajagenupula/com...e-c4b2ece40123

You need to download the source, not the ready-made package if you want to build
deb10u6 means it belongs to debian 10
gtk is a compile time option, you will not find special source packages for this, but for the already compiled variants (if they were built using gtk).

"deb10u6 means it belongs to debian 10" => but I can build this source in "debianic" distributions, no? Specifically, I think I am using an Ubuntu version that was created after Debian 10, and since Ubuntu is based in Debian, I assume it would work. 🤔

Buddy, please notice that I downloaded the Vim source code, although I start talking about a package. The difference is that I downloaded the source code from the same page, in Debian domain, that hosted the package I initially tried to use (simply because I assume the newest source code can be harder to be compatible with these computers' setups, so it does not contain possibly newer dependencies that I could need to install before compiling; but these extra requirements will hardly be something I want, since the newest Vim feature that I think I use is the graphical copy+paste register, and the rest are details in the usual operations I do since 10 years ago or more). I extracted this source code, checked its README files, but could not succeed with them - and this point, I created the thread.

No.

If a distro is just a re-configured Debian and exclusively uses Debian package repos, in that situation you can use the equivalent Debian source.

When a distro has its own repositories containing packages that modify the Debian source and/or dependencies, then trying to use the original source may or not work.

Ubuntu is in the latter category, and whilst approx 80% of its packages are unmodified from Debian Testing, Vim is an example from the remaining 20% that has Ubuntu-specific changes.

You can determine this by looking at //tracker.debian.org/pkg/vim and seeing that Debian Testing has "2:9.1.0016-1" whilst Ubuntu has "2:9.1.0016-1ubuntu2" - compare that to other packages and you'll see some match but others don't.

It is also important to understand that Ubuntu is based on Debian Testing - it is not based on stable releases like Debian 10 - and thus the versions of software involve may not match.

It is also important to understand that each Debian edition decides which version of software to include, not the other way round, so...
Yes, it is entirely correct. The version/codename is defined in your sources.list which tells Apt where to read the list of packages, and that list of packages directs it to where the final deb is located. At time of writing, both Testing and Unstable have the same version of Vim, but there is only one Deb file which they both point at.

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Although I took many days to read this post, you write many "details" in it that I did not know, and did not expect to be true. But since they are, I will try a different path, the next time I use those computers (if I do, for now, it is suspended for a possibly short, but not clearly defined number of days).

Thank you very much.