Building tmux 1.9a, Vim 7.4 and Command-T on CentOS 6.3 Edit

Created 3/6/2014, updated 5/18/2017

Historically, building tmux on CentOS has been a pretty delicate subject, with specific requirements for each version.

This article shows steps that currently work, at least for me, to perform a clean install of:

tmux 1.9a
Vim 7.4 (including patches 1-192)
Ruby 2.1.1
Python 3.3.4
Command-T (current HEAD of the next branch)

on CentOS 6.3. These are the latest versions of each of the packages.

I have a couple of requirements:

These all get installed in one’s $HOME directory, which means that you won’t clobber the system-installed versions of these things, and we don’t need root privileges to install (other than a couple of prerequisites). Doing this requires statically-linking tmux with ncurses and libevent, which makes things a little trickier.
Vim needs both Ruby and Python in order to work with some key plug-ins that I use (Command-T needs Ruby, for example, and UltiSnips and Gundo need Python)

The following notes assumed you’ve downloaded and unpacked the corresponding software package source into directories under ~/build (and in the case of Vim, we use a clone of its upstream Mercurial repo, because Bram doesn’t do point release between major versions; in the case of Command-T, I’m using a Pathogen-managed submodule at ~/.vim/bundle/command-t).

$ cd build
$ sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ glibc-static # this is the only bit you need root for
$ JOBS=32 # make it fast

libevent

$ cd ~/build/libevent-2.0.21-stable
$ make clean; ./configure --disable-shared --enable-static --prefix=$HOME && make -j$JOBS install

ncurses

$ cd ../ncurses-5.9
$ make clean; ./configure --disable-shared --enable-static --with-termlib --with-ticlib --prefix=$HOME && make -j$JOBS install

Python

$ cd ../Python-3.3.4
$ make clean; ./configure --prefix=$HOME && make -j$JOBS install inclinstall && hash -r

Ruby

$ cd ../ruby-2.1.1
$ make clean; ./configure --prefix=$HOME && make -j$JOBS install

Command-T

$ cd ~/.vim/bundle/command-t/ruby/command-t
$ ruby extconf.rb && make

tmux

$ cd ~/build/tmux-1.9a
make clean; env PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/lib/pkgconfig CPPFLAGS="-I$HOME/include -I$HOME/include/ncurses" CFLAGS="-I$HOME/include -I$HOME/include/ncurses" LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/lib" ./configure --enable-static --prefix=$HOME && make -j$JOBS install

Vim

$ cd ../vim
$ hg pull && hg update
$ make clean distclean; env LDFLAGS=-L$HOME/lib ./configure --with-features=huge --enable-rubyinterp --enable-python3interp --enable-cscope --disable-nls --prefix=$HOME --with-python-config-dir=$HOME/lib/python3.3/config-3.3m && make -j$JOBS install

Notes

I use make clean; [command] rather than make clean && [command] above because if this is the first time you’ve built the projects you might not actually have a Makefile present yet.

Building tmux 1.9a, Vim 7.4 and Command-T on CentOS 6.3Edit