Best way to upgrade vim/gvim to 7.3 in Ubuntu 10.04?

The first place to check is if there's a backport, but there isn't, which isn't surprising since maverick has vim 7.2 too.

The next thing to try is if someone's put up a repository with vim 7.3 packages somewhere, preferably a PPA. There are many PPAs with vim, including several with 7.3 (not an exhaustive list).

If you don't find a binary package anywhere or don't like the ones you find, the next easiest step is to grab the source package from natty, which has vim 7.3. Download the source package (.dsc, .debian.tar.gz and .orig.tar.gz), then run

apt-get install build-essential fakeroot
apt-get build-dep vim
dpkg-source -x vim_7.3.035+hg~8fdc12103333-1ubuntu2.dsc
cd vim-7.3.035+hg~8fdc12103333
# Edit debian/changelog to add an entry with your name and “recompiled for lucid”
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -b -nc

If all goes well, you'll have binary packages for your distributions. If you run into missing dependencies or compilation errors, this has to be solved on a case-by-case basis.

The next thing to try is to compile the upstream 7.3 source with the packaging from your Ubuntu version. This gives you a nice and clean package, but it's a little more involved, so if you don't feel confident in doing this without instructions I recommend you just compile the upstream source.

If you end up compiling the upstream source, by default, you'll end up with the files under /usr/local, and it won't be easy to uninstall them, or even to know what you have. Whenever you install something without using the package manager, I recommend installing into a separate directory structure and creating symbolic links in /usr/local (or ~/usr or whatever). Stow is nice for that:

• Install under /usr/local/stow (or ~/usr/stow or wherever). With many programs, you can use something like ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/vim-7.3. This will put the main binary at /usr/local/stow/vim-7.3/bin, and so on.
• Run stow vim-7.3 from the /usr/local/stow directory. This creates symbolic links in the “normal” directories, e.g. /usr/local/bin/vim -> ../../stow/vim-7.3/bin/vim.
• If you ever want to uninstall this program, just run stow -D vim-7.3 to remove the symbolic links, and delete /usr/local/stow/vim-7.3.

There is also xstow which is a similar, but more powerful programs (one of its benefits is that it can deal with conflicts).

Build from source. It will be quicker. Trying to both find and enable a repository for a one-off install like that will just cause you headaches further down the line.