Vim + rails.vim Seg-Faults in Ubuntu 8

Like many have, I installed the latest version of Ubuntu late last week. I did not have a lot of time to get Hardy Heron ready for day-to-day development until Monday. While using it for half a day yesterday, Vim had been producing segmentation faults from time to time. It was irritating, but wasn’t happening often enough to get me too excited to track down the issue.

Vim: Caught deadly signal SEGV

That is, until today. It’s been absolutely infuriating. I’m a guy that might, you know, punch or throw an inanimate object in moments of frustration. Thus far, I have managed to avoid damaging anything, but it’s been close.

Thankfully, I am not the only one with this problem. Here is the Ubuntu bug report, bug #219546. To summarize, the plugin rails.vim, in concert with Vim version 7.1.138, seg-faults when using tab completion together with a rails.vim command such as ‘:RTcontroller pe[TAB][TAB]’.

Crap. What do I do?

Within the bug report, a few have suggested that installing from source will fix the issue – or, install from the Debian Sid packages. I chose to install from source. That seemed to fix the issue for me.

A quote from dominiko, within the bug report comments:

If I download the latest vim (vim-7.1.293) source code (see http://www.vim.org/download.php), and compiled it myself:   cd vim7   ./configure --with-features=huge   make   make install Then it works fine...

That is my recommendation. If you have any trouble, you are welcome to comment here and I will do what I can to help. Be wary! Be warned! Take my advice at your own risk! I am far from an expert.