On 22/04/15 02:57, Allan McRae wrote:
On 22/04/15 08:55, Evangelos Foutras wrote:
By the way, it's worth noting that vim-minimal has a footprint of about 30 MiB. It's not much, but compared to nano's 2 MiB, it's way larger.
I'm probably repeating what I've written in my previous posts, but to me the cleanest implementation is to have one tiny editor in [core] as part of the base installation (nano), and use that as the fallack for the five or so programs that used to default to vi.
Adding a second, much larger, editor in [core] and base (vim) just so that it can be made the default fallback, seems kind of unnecessary.
If nano was not in base, what do you think the install proportion would be?
This is mainly for consistency. I could not find another distribution where visudo does not call /usr/bin/vi by default (and I saw that provided by vim-minimal a lot).
We're faced with the dilemma of which editor to use as a fallback for a handful of applications. I shouldn't have used the term "default" as it can be incorrectly interpreted as "We're changing the default editor". Yes, we could certainly move vim-minimal to [core]. The downsides would be 1) a 30 MiB increase in the size of the standard installation and 2) having to maintain a package across two repositories. Both are somewhat minor issues, of course. While I prefer and do use vim myself, the extra complexity introduced by maintaining a second editor in [core] isn't justified, considering one can simply install vim, specify set VISUAL=vim and delete nano if they wish. I feel a stronger case would need to be made for moving vim-minimal to [core]. At the moment we're only trying to figure out a sane fallback editor, mostly for visudo and I guess cronie's crontab. nano seems to fit the bill and requires no additional packages in [core] or base. (The fact that visudo has 'vi' in its name isn't a valid argument. :P)