Comment 6 for bug 255847

This problem is happening because the users only have vim-tiny installed and manually installed vim-runtime instead of installing a more featureful vim package (vim, vim-nox, vim-gtk, vim-gnome) which will automatically pull in vim-runtime.

Ideally users won't run into this as much once they upgrade to a 2:7.2.049-1 or later since that removes the vim alternative from vim-tiny, thus making it more likely they'll install one of the other vim packages (and hopefully removing a lot of confusion about how vim behaves when only vim-tiny is installed).