Bug#299837: vim can't find its help files

[David Lawyer]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 09:33:41AM +0100, Norbert Tretkowski wrote:
> * David Lawyer wrote:
> > If I type :help I get a message that
> > /usr/share/vim/vim63/doc/help.txt.gz can't be found. That's true,
> > because what exists is /usr/share/vim/vim63/doc/help.txt. So what's
> > wrong is that vim is looking for a compressed file (.gz) while what
> > exists is not compressed. This problem happened after I downloaded a
> > new version of vim using apt-get.
> 
> Please retry this when running vim with "-u NONE -U NONE" parameter as
> parameters. Does it still happen?

Works OK if I do this.  Note that 3 of you responded to my bug report:
Norbert, Alexis, and Matthijs.  3 replies are better than none :-).
Here's what was in /etc/vimrc and caused my problem:

" Debian uses compressed helpfiles. We must inform vim that the main
" helpfiles is compressed. Other helpfiles are stated in the tags-file.
set helpfile=$VIMRUNTIME/doc/help.txt.gz

When I upgraded vim (using apt-get upgrade), I elected to keep my old
/etc/vimrc file, since I had customized it.  I never thought there would be
any problem with doing this.  Since the above 3 lines were put in
/etc/vimrc by a previous Debian install, shouldn't they be removed by a
later Debian install if one elects to use the previous vimrc file?  Yes,
I now know that it's best to put my own changes in /etc/vimrc.local,
which I've done so that something like this doesn't happen again.
Thanks all for the quick response.

			David Lawyer