On 21 April 2015 at 22:32, Evangelos Foutras <evangelos@foutrelis.com> wrote:
On 21/04/15 16:27, Allan McRae wrote:
What happened to adding a symlink? Now there is no "vi" in base, many packages there are broken out of the box - sudo (visudo), bash (bashbug), less (when pressing v). There is bound to be more...
Or are we having all those packages depend on vim?
td;dr: No symlink; instead, let's configure those programs to use nano.
During the previous discussion, Alexander posted a list of applications that depend on vi. [1]
Based on that list, the following packages can be configured at compile time to use an editor other than vi:
sudo less util-linux shadow
It's not mentioned on the list, but cronie also accepts a ./configure flag to set the default editor.
The remaining use cases seem small enough that relying on VISUAL/EDITOR for those doesn't sound too bad.
The real question is, what do we set the default editor to; nano (in [core] and part of the base group so it gets installed by default) or vim (highly preferred choice for some people, but not in [core])?
What we are looking for here is a sane default, so nano seems like the better choice. If nobody complains too loudly, I'll switch sudo, less, util-linux, shadow and cronie to use nano by default in a couple of days.
[1] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-January/024357.ht...
As long as the EDITOR variable is supported by those programs, maybe yes. But I don't think creating a symlink *anyway* and make vim provide vi is inappropriate. J. Leclanche